


The Secretary

by PacificRimbaud



Series: Workplace Shenanigans [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Comedy, Consensual Kink, Consensual Sex, Dominance, Enthusiastic Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hair-pulling, Happy Ending, Heavy Drinking, Jealousy, Light Angst, Office Sex, Possessive Behavior, Praise Kink, Romantic Comedy, Rope Bondage, Shibari, Smoking, Smut, Spanking, Submission, Swearing, Trapped In Elevator, Vaginal Sex, rolled sleeves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:41:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22091254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: Threatened with the loss of her trust fund allowance, wild child Pansy Parkinson takes her mother up on an offer she can't refuse: a job at the Ministry of Magic as personal secretary to tightly wound bureaucrat Percy Weasley.The job is demanding, and so is her boss, in ways that Pansy never could have imagined.When their mutual desires begin to spin out of control, how will Pansy convince her boss that sometimes, the only rules you need to follow are your own?A loving tribute to the pure and criminally underappreciated magic that is the ParkWeasel ship, and the 2002 filmSecretary.
Relationships: Pansy Parkinson/Percy Weasley
Series: Workplace Shenanigans [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1891585
Comments: 372
Kudos: 788
Collections: Harry Potter Rare Pairs Recommendations





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work is HIGHLY SEXUALLY EXPLICIT, with an abundance of very crass language. If you're under the age of 18, or if that's not your deal, please click on by.
> 
> The story is an extremely liberal adaptation of the 2002 film _Secretary_ , starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. Several scenes are very close to the way they play out in the film, most are totally different, and in a few cases, small amounts of dialogue have been directly quoted. I highly recommend watching it if you haven't! 
> 
> This is a piece about two people discovering, exploring, and coming to terms with their kinks, NOT about an already formalized, codified BDSM relationship. Although their process of coming to understand their dynamic is imperfect, all sex and physical interaction will happen with, at bare minimum, nonverbal consent. 
> 
> Themes of dominance and submission as well as some light discipline between consenting adults will be explored, and I will tag specific activities to the best of my ability with each chapter.
> 
> Enjoy!

  
[photo upload website](https://imgbb.com/)

“Good morning, beautiful.”

Pansy shook off the too-warm finger tracing a line down the bare skin of her hip, and half-cocked a single, sticky eyelid.

 _Fuck_.

The sun was slamming into her retina without even buying her a drink first, and her mouth tasted like the inside of a bin at a fish market.

Pansy sealed her eye shut again, and rolled over onto her belly.

Gods, what was this one’s name? She breathed in, fighting back the feeling of rising sick, and tried to think through the previous evening.

It had been an admittedly good fuck.

He was a sales clerk at the Muggle bookshop she liked: tallish, rower’s arms, black hair, cable knit sweater, massive, beautiful brown eyes, notably smooth cock, said nothing but “Yes,” repetitively, while he was buried balls deep inside her.

She’d recognized him at that bar in Fitzrovia that Tracey liked to take her to, the one with the ironic collection of blunderbusses hung on the wall, and had brought him home, encouraging his searching hands to go further in the back of a cab.

“Tea’s in the kitchen, Sharif,” she said through dry lips. “Second cupboard to the left of the sink. Then feel free to let yourself out.”

She pulled her pillow over her head, and was asleep again before he could make any answer.

“Pansy.”

It was later, whatever that meant.

Pansy stirred, slightly less than half awake, and pulled the pillow tighter around her ears.

“Fuck off,” she mumbled.

“Pansy Parkinson.”

“I said, fuck off, Sharif,” she repeated from underneath the pillow. “You have a very pretty cock, but I’m in the midst of an ongoing dispute with last night's tequila, and I'm not sucking you off again. If you’re hard, have a wank, fix yourself a fucking tea and make sure the bloody door clicks shut on your way out.”

“Lovely," said a deliberate voice that sounded like it was capable of explaining eight generations' worth of family oil portraits, and had been exposed early and often to an abundance of privately owned country air. "I’m enormously pleased that our investment in elocution lessons afforded you with the means to express yourself in the richest and most sophisticated of terms.”

Pansy threw the pillow off of her head, and sat up.

“Oh. Fuck,” she said.

“Indeed,” said her mother.

Pansy scrambled for the bed sheet that was wound around her hips, and pulled it up to cover her breasts.

“Good morning, Mother,” she said once she was situated and rubbing at her eyes with her fingertips.

“It’s nearly one o’clock in the afternoon," declared her mother from her perch at the edge of the low armchair in the corner of Pansy’s bedroom.

She was dressed in her near daily uniform of a wool crepe pencil skirt and long-sleeved silk blouse, a set of understated pearls at her neck and dangling from her ears, and her black hair, tinseled sparingly with threads of grey, was wound into a smooth chignon. Her legs, in sheer nude stockings, were crossed at the ankles, and tucked away with well-bred propriety to one side. The type of dragon leather handbag for which there was a years-long waiting list, her sole nod to conspicuous consumption, sat stiffly next to her feet, a patterned silk scarf knotted at the shoulder strap.

She looked as she always did: cool and perfected, pale and brittle as porcelain, as she brushed a piece of imaginary lint from her skirt front.

"How long have you been here?" asked Pansy. She leaned over the edge of the bed, and rifled through the balled up fabric of last night's dress until she located the right pocket, and pulled out a silver cigarette case and Muggle lighter.

"Long enough to be treated to the sight of a Muggle helping himself to a cup of tea in your kitchen, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a smile. I Oblivated him for you and sent him on his way."

"You did what?" said Pansy. "I didn't expose him to any magic, Mother."

"Yes. Well. Apparently that's the only thing you didn't expose to him."

Pansy lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew out a stream of smoke in the general direction of the chair.

"I can't tell if it's my fucking that bothers you, or my fucking Muggles," she said, pulling a flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. "Or perhaps you have specific qualms about Scottish-Egyptian boys from West Kensington who like to recite Walt Whitman."

Her mother wafted away the smoke with one hand, and rose from the chair.

"What bothers me," she said, "is the owls that I receive from well-meaning friends delicately informing me that my only child is frequently spotted stumbling across Muggle London, soaked in gin, rubbing her hind quarters against every available male like a cat in heat."

Pansy tossed her head back and laughed.

" _That_ is a vivid image," she said. “Please inform your friends that lately I’ve been favoring whiskey, neat, although last night belonged _entirely_ to a rather peppery tequila blanco.”

Her mother crouched down demurely from the knees, pinched a pair of black lace knickers lying on the floor between her clear-lacquered fingernails, and dropped them into the crowded laundry hamper in the corner.

“As much fun as this little chat has been, I have come here with a point.”

“Please,” said Pansy, “don’t wait to make it on my account.”

“I was pleased to receive an invitation to the wedding of Draco Malfoy,” her mother said, looking at Pansy pointedly.

Pansy sat up higher against her headboard, took another drag from her cigarette, and said nothing.

“I’m sure you were made aware,” said her mother.

“He’s marrying a Muggle-born witch, Mother," said Pansy, flicking ash into the jadeite tray on her nightstand. "I’m sure you were made aware of that.”

Pansy’s mother stiffened slightly, then relaxed again, polished and serene.

“Times aren’t what they were,” she conceded tranquilly. “And, I trust, that's all for the best. The issue at hand is that your peers are settling down and starting their families, and in many instances since that regrettable war, rising before their time to take over at the helm of their family fortunes. And you, Pansy, are getting drunk almost every night and making a mockery of the values of purity and propriety that have been the bedrock of respectable Wizarding families for countless generations."

Pansy abruptly swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood, cigarette pinched between the index and middle fingers of her right hand, and wrapped the bedsheet tightly around her chest.

“That’s all _very_ interesting, Mother, but please excuse me, I have to pee in the worst way.”

She shut herself into the en suite, stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray next to the bathtub, leaned against the wall, and let out a long outbreath.

She was drinking too much. She didn’t need her mother to tell her that. It wasn’t _every_ night, for Merlin’s sake, but it was far too often, and far too much.

And she knew about Draco’s impending nuptials, as she’d been on the extremely short list of people he Flooed with the wonderful news straight away after getting his answer.

She was happy for him, genuinely, although she couldn't say she entirely understood the attraction of an uptight goody goody who came prepackaged with a pair of useless appendages in the form of Potter and the least competent Weasley.

And while she would never apologize, ever, for inviting any consenting adult she pleased into her own bed, she also couldn’t say she was overly sorry about her mother Obliviating the unfortunate Sharif. She rather liked his book shop, and wasn’t sure she was going to be able to go back there once she’d spent time cradling his balls in her mouth and listening to him whine about it.

In any case, the last thing she was going to do was give her mother the satisfaction of knowing she was right, ever, about anything.

Pansy peed, washed up, dragged her fingers through her dark French bob, and rewrapped herself in her bed sheet before charging out of the bathroom and straight into her closet.

“Pansy?” said her mother through the door as Pansy was pulling on a pair of cheeky knickers and a bralette.

She flicked through a rack of dresses, and then opted for a pair of black cigarette pants and an oversized black and white striped Breton shirt.

She sailed back out into her bedroom, where she stashed her wand, her cigarette case and lighter in the pocket of her trousers and turned to face her mother.

“Yes, Mother? Can you speed things up, I'm expected at brunch." 

“You're being cut off.”

Pansy blinked.

“What?”

Her mother sat back down on the edge of the chair in the corner of the room, with her handbag perched in her lap like an extremely expensive little dog.

“In light of your ongoing behavior, your father and I have agreed, and the terms of your trust have been altered.”

For a moment, Pansy was at a loss for words.

“You _can’t_ change the terms of my trust,” she finally said, incredulously. “Can you?”

“We can, and we have. For the time being, the house,” Pansy’s mother gestured slightly, indicating the London townhouse Pansy occupied, “is unaffected, as neither of us is interested in you sleeping under an overhang in Diagon Alley, but your allowance will be conditional.”

Pansy felt a wave of fear wash over her skin.

“Conditional on what?” she asked.

“On your being married,” said her mother.

“Married?” shouted Pansy. “I absolutely, categorically, will _not_ …”

Before she could continue, her mother raised one of her narrow, elegant hands to stop her.

“ _Or_ ,” continued her mother, “you will work.”

Pansy’s jaw clamped shut.

Her mother stood again, and moved toward the fireplace in Pansy’s bedroom.

“The changes to the trust took effect early this morning.” She turned her wrist over to look at the face of a delicate gold watch. “I believe while you were sleeping off your abysmal life choices with your paramour. As I'm well aware that you do not have immediate employment prospects, I took the frankly humiliating liberty of using my Ministry connections to secure you a job."

Pansy shook her head in disbelief.

"A job? Doing _what_?"

“I’m sorry, Pansy, would you prefer the marriage option?”

Pansy’s left eye twitched.

"I thought not,” said her mother. “You'll be personal secretary to a high ranking civil servant within the offices of the Ministry for Justice. You begin tomorrow, Monday morning at 8 a.m. sharp, so you may wish to dry out. Freshen up. Get a haircut.” She looked around the room. “Deal with your laundry.”

She reached into her handbag, pulled out a matte ecru business card, and tucked it in front of one of the small cups of a fire engine red demi-buste brassiere dangling from the mantelpiece over the fireplace.

"As long as you have a full-time job, of any kind, you will have this house, and your allowance. If your employment lapses, you will lose the latter, unless you secure a new job in a timely fashion. We’re also not leaving the townhouse entirely off the table, if you fail to rein in your behavior. At the very least, _attempt_ to be discreet.”

She bent down, and when she stood, there was a man’s white cotton athletic sock pinched between her fingernails, held out as if in explanation. She dropped it again, and dusted off her hands.

“I needn't spell it out that it will behoove you to at least _try_ , Pansy, to do your best."

Before Pansy could think of a clever rejoinder, her mother lifted a measure of Floo powder from the dish on the mantelpiece, tossed it lightly into the fireplace, and was gone.

Pansy approached the fireplace, and lifted up the business card.

It read, in an aggressively plain black geometric sans-serif typeface:

Percy Weasley

Second Permanent Secretary

Office of the Minister for Justice

The image of an auburn-haired Prefect, walking the halls of Hogwarts with a stick rammed up his back end and a look of unsmiling superiority planted on his freckled face flashed through her mind.

"What the _fuck!_ " Pansy shouted.

She leaned down, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted pointlessly into the fireplace.

" _Cunt!_ "

“Percy Weasley? He’s a cunt.”

Pansy, peering through the lenses of a pair of enormous round black sunglasses despite the unbroken sheet of cloud cover, pulled the celery stick from her Bloody Mary, then pointed the dripping tip of it at Blaise.

“He’s a walloping great cunt,” she asserted, then turned the celery stick to her mouth and bit it.

“D’you know he once prevented me keeping an appointment to feel up Tracey in the alcove behind the tapestry of the dubious pixies in the first-floor corridor?” said Blaise, breaking open the yolk on top of his eggs Benedict.

“Cockblocking, cunt behavior,” said Pansy. “Hold on a minute, you’ve felt up Tracey?”

“No, I never have. I was cockblocked, you’ll remember,” said Blaise, morosely. “I’m not sure she had much going in the way of breasts just then, but they’re uncommonly lovely now, and I’ll never know what they feel like, will I.”

“You've always been a breast man. You could break up with Daphne again and have a go,” said Pansy, licking away a strip of salt from the rim of her glass.

“I’m reasonably satisfied with Daph’s breasts for the moment, thanks," shrugged Blaise.

“That’s a ringing endorsement that I’ll be sure to pass along to her.”

“Besides,” Blaise continued, “old Father Greengrass would have me framed for grand larceny or some kind of pervert crime if I broke things off again within three months.”

“You are a bit of a pervert.”

“To the extent that Daphne allows it, yes.”

“You know damn well that under that soft blonde exterior, she's a Viking warrior queen that takes exactly no shit. And yet, you return.”

“Indeed,” agreed Blaise. “Though it’s not like you’d ever let anyone push you around, either.”

Pansy gave a little laugh.

“He’d have to be something very special, wouldn’t he.”

Blaise nodded, and took a bite of his egg.

“Shall we go to the shops, then?” he asked. “I’ll advise you on what’s best suited to secretarial work at the Ministry. We’ll start with the tight leather skirt straining across your perky wee bum, six inch heels, fishnets _with_ the seam down the back of those bloody great stems of yours, a little peek of leopard bra through the strained buttons of your Oxford blouse.”

Pansy looked down at her bosom.

“These aren’t straining the buttons on anything any time soon. Still, I could go for a little naughty leather. Can you imagine the look on Weasley’s face?” She dropped her chin, looked up at Blaise through her eyelashes, and said in a breathy, humid voice, “‘Yes, sir, I’ll file your papers for you directly, sir. Do you take your women the way you take your tea...sweet, and hot?’”

“Oh, don’t do that to poor, wound up old Cuntweasel. He’d be a quivering mess,” said Blaise. “Merlin, do that, and _I’m_ halfway to being a quivering mess, and I’d wager I’ve seen an exponentially greater number of women out of their knickers than that thundering cunt has. You sure we can’t have a torrid affair one of these days?”

Pansy looked seriously at Blaise, tall and beautiful, with his burnished bronze skin, wide-set eyes and soft, obnoxiously charming curls.

“Don’t take this poorly, as you are undoubtedly a god among men, and by all accounts you have an inch on Draco in every interesting dimension, but please, just for a moment: picture my hand on your cock,” she said.

Blaise shuddered, and not in the good way.

“Exactly,” she concluded.

In the end, they decided on making her look not entirely unlike her mother.

On Monday morning, she stepped through one of the Ministry Floos at 8:02, hair shining and pressed into loose waves, wearing a wool crepe pencil skirt in black. If it was tighter and shorter than her mother would have worn, Pansy chalked it up to Blaise’s influence. Her white silk blouse had a round collar and a black contrast bow at the neck, which she echoed with a pair of black heels with a cheeky ankle strap. She’d done a sheer pink lip for her first day in the office, but opted for her favorite winged eyeliner, and in lieu of a robe, she wore a black half cape, and carried a green dragon leather handbag.

She was clutching a Muggle paper hot drinks cup with thin paper handles as her heels clicked over the polished floors.

At 8:06, she had located the mahogany front door of the Office of the Minister for Justice, and pushed her way through.

There was a long central desk at the front of the room, behind which stood an orderly grid of smaller individual desks, most occupied with a witch or wizard scratching busily away with a quill. There was a long transom window over the entryway, propped open, and through this moved a steady stream of folded paper aeroplanes, which looped over the heads of the employees and dropped down onto their desks. Pansy saw two or three tissue paper parachutes float through dragging bundles of rolled parchment, which dropped onto their target desks before the parachutes spontaneously combusted into wisps of scentless smoke.

Arranged around the perimeter was a series of closed mahogany doors, flanked by brass name plates, each with a transom window of its own and a desk out front, set parallel to the wall.

At the long front desk sat a pair of witches wearing matching looks of the sort of bored yet justifiably prideful complacency that comes with total mastery of a job’s daily demands.

“Can I help you?” asked the witch on the left, elegantly dressed in a blue shawl collar pullover and earrings in hammered silver shaped like moons, one full and one crescent, and whose smooth brown skin looked 20 years younger than her braided salt and pepper hair. She wore a brass name tag that read “Ines.”

“I’m here for the secretary position,” said Pansy. She hitched up her chin defiantly. “With Mr. Weasley.”

Ines exchanged a brief, loaded look with her desk partner, a narrow-shouldered, light-skinned witch whose name tag said “Kath,” and whose warm blonde hair was cropped into a pixie cut over sweetly protruding ears. She wore an ill-fitting hand knitted cardigan, and reading glasses with clear pink frames clipped around her neck on a crocheted eyeglass chain.

“I’ll let him know that you’re here,” said Ines. She pulled a quill from its stand, wrote a brief note on a small square of pastel blue parchment, and gave it a tap with the hawthorn wand she drew out of a pocket in her floral skirt. It promptly folded itself into the shape of a hummingbird, flew off into the crowded airspace of the interdepartmental memos, narrowly avoiding a collision with a swinging parcel of parchments, and ducked through one of the transom windows over the interior doors.

Ines stood, watching Pansy with neutral interest, while they waited.

“Stopped for a tea, love?” she asked Pansy.

Pansy looked down at the cup clutched in her freshly manicured hand.

“I was running a little late this morning, and hadn’t had a cup yet,” she explained. “Didn’t want to be yawning at the desk first day.” She gave Ines what she thought was a congenial smile.

“No. You do not want to do that,” said Ines, and though her mouth was slightly upturned, her voice contained no hint of amusement.

After a moment, a nondescript small white paper bird descended to the desk in front of Ines, and flattened itself out into an unwrinkled square. She peered at the writing, then walked around to the end of the long desk, and gestured for Pansy to follow her.

They traveled clockwise around the perimeter of the room, passing by several of the mahogany doors. Pansy noted that at each of the desks posted outside these doors sat a witch or wizard, each one with a quill in hand, all of whom looked up at Pansy with wary interest.

When they reached a door a third of the way along the farthest wall, they stopped, and Pansy glanced down at the desk outside, empty but for a waiting quill stand, ink pot, letter tray, and a little stack of square pieces of parchment, all white.

The brass name plate beside the door read:

Percy Weasley

Second Permanent Secretary

Ines knocked twice, softly, and a male voice sounded on the other side.

“Come in.”

Ines turned the door handle and led Pansy inside.

Pansy wasn’t sure what she had anticipated, but Percy Weasley’s office managed to defy every expectation, most of which had flowed from her broad perception of what it meant to conduct one's life as a Weasley.

She’d long outgrown the pettiest impulses towards meanness that she’d had at school. So much so that sometimes lubricated with alcohol, and sometimes dry and rough, she’d made apologies for the casual cruelties of her past where she felt like she ought.

But she retained, despite the firm intentions she made each first of January of being a better, kinder, wiser Pansy, an edge to her, narrow and cool and sharp as a well honed blade. And she had never shaken the opinion that the Weasley clan was something comprehensively shabby.

The office she entered was not.

Where the Ministry corridors vibrated with the bureaucratic choreography of clicking heels, hustling bodies, and paper wings stirring up shadows over dark floors and shining hardwood surfaces, Percy Weasley’s office was cool and silent and comparatively light.

Pansy was intimately familiar with the ways in which the very rich chose to indulge their aesthetic impulses. She’d seen countless attempts at the exhibition of good taste, and more commonly, at the exhibition of how much of someone else’s good taste could be bought, from gilded Rococo excess to brilliant and shimmering embroidered silk oases to brute grey stoicism, but Pansy was overwhelmed with the impression that this space wasn’t about any of that.

There was the clean surface of the wooden desk, likely of ornate and bulky Ministry issue, here Transfigured into a warm teak slab on slender, softly geometric legs with a lean row of simple drawers.

The pair of chairs that sat in front of it were a sculptural paean to function-driven form, mid-toned wood joined invisibly into curved and continuous lines from back to floor, their lightly concave seats upholstered in pebbled black leather. Pansy found herself wishing Percy would stand from his place behind the desk so she could have a look at whatever he was sitting in on the opposite side.

The room was spacious, and where the walls weren't hidden by meticulously organized shelves of books, she could see that they were painted a dark grey-green. A fire burned low in the hearth, above which was an unadorned mantle. The space would have called to mind the Slytherin common room, were it not for the large rectangular window behind the desk.

It was enchanted to show a visual field of variegated green: a cluster of girthy evergreen trees and maples, with amber sunlight twisting its way through the lichen-strung branches. 

There was nothing that didn’t need to be in Percy Weasley’s office: a utilitarian magical brass desk lamp; low-lit wall sconces; a plain, slub-textured charcoal grey rug; everything had been invited there to perform a function, except for a cluster of large indoor plants in cream-colored pots grouped in a corner close to the window.

They were tall and lush, with dark, glossy leaves lifting their tips lazily toward the filtered sunlight streaming past the window.

Percy was sitting at his desk with a quill in hand, head bent down towards a long strip of parchment.

Pansy tried to think back to the last time she’d actually seen Percy Weasley. It had been ages, perhaps not since he’d left school. Eight years ago?

He had changed, and also had not.

He was built from the same tall, gangly blueprint as the rest of his brothers, though age had filled him out into something less like a jangling collection of elbows, more long-limbed elegance than awkward angles. He wore a midnight blue three piece wool suit and a dark tie with a conservative pattern of cream-colored dots, and his auburn hair was cropped tidily and combed meticulously into shape. He wore a pair of black horn rimmed glasses, and his angular jaw was shaved perfectly smooth. The dusting of freckles was exactly the same as she remembered, and something about the way they played in rebellious disorganization across his skin seemed like the fingerprints of nature’s defiance over all the things he had so conspicuously found himself able to control. His handsomeness was nearly pedestrian and unremarkable, but then there were added the freckles, and his mouth, a millimeter too wide, and he became imperfect in a way that elevated him into something new. You found you wanted to look at him, and Pansy realized instantly and to her absolute disgust that if she’d just met him in a bar, she’d fuck him in a heartbeat.

He sat up straight in his chair like he’d taken part in the same comportment classes that Pansy had been made to sit through for fifteen years of her own life, and as he worked, his hand moved with unhurried ease across the parchment.

The tips of his fingers were lightly stained with ink.

Without looking up, he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Guerrero.”

It was a clear dismissal, and Ines nodded and slipped out the door, shutting it behind her with a click.

Pansy stood, waiting.

After a long moment where his quill never stopped scratching against the surface of his parchment, Percy finally gestured with his free hand at one of the chairs in front of his desk.

“Please, Miss Parkinson, have a seat.”

She moved around and sat, perched lightly at the edge of the chair, and waited while he continued to write, never once looking up at her.

“You arrived late,” he said, abruptly, then set down his quill, lifted his face, and fixed her with a stare. "With a takeaway tea."

Pansy started.

His eyes were a clear, warm blue, unwavering and self-assured.

“It’s my first day,” she said. “And I haven’t worked in…” she twisted her fingers around the handle of her bag, “...well, ever.”

“So I understand.”

He blew gently on the strip of parchment to dry the ink, then carefully and slowly rolled it up, and placed it at the top of a pyramid of similarly rolled papers at the front of his desk.

“As I wasn’t able to participate in this hiring decision, Miss Parkinson, I am wholly in the dark as to what qualifications you bring to this position. I suspect none. Unfortunately for me, secretarial work doesn’t bear much resemblance to what I’ve been led to believe you’re accustomed to doing with your time, which is primarily going out to clubs, taking late lunches, and spending your parents’ money.”

Pansy narrowed her eyes.

“Am I mistaken in any respect?” he asked.

She breathed out hard, and clenched her jaw.

“And yet, here we find ourselves,” he said. He pulled up his sleeve, and glanced down at the face of a plain watch with a black leather strap. “I take my tea very hot, with one sugar, and a generous splash of milk.”

With that, he was finished with her. He pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from a stack to his left, and picked his quill up to write.

Pansy sat, blinking.

“I’ll just fix you a tea then, shall I?” she asked, and she wasn’t sorry to hear the edge of sarcasm in her own voice.

“I’ll leave you to it, Miss Parkinson.”

She huffed as she rose, and let herself out of his office.

Throwing her bag down on the desk outside his office door, she removed her half cape and hung it up on a coat tree standing nearby, and made her way to the front desk, where Ines was busily filing rolls of parchment into a large bank of square compartments, and Kath was watching as a pink paper parrot unfolded itself in front of her.

“Pardon me,” said Pansy, archly, “but it appears that he’d fancy a cup of tea.”

Ines flicked her eyes to Pansy.

“The kitchenette is just through there, dear,” said Ines, pointing to an open doorway on the opposite side of the room to Percy’s office.

In the kitchen, Pansy found a large kettle, a box of tea, a sugar bowl and a pitcher of milk with a cooling charm sitting on the neat wooden counter top.

“I take my tea very hot, with one sugar, and a generous splash of milk,” she repeated, mockingly, as she poured boiling water over the tea leaves. “Wanker.”

She made her way back across the office, carefully balancing the steaming hot cup on its saucer, and turned the handle of Percy’s door.

He was still writing away on his parchment, and she moved to his desk, set down the cup and saucer, and took a step back.

“Will that be all, Mr. Weasley?” she asked.

“‘Sir’,” he said, again without looking up.

“Excuse me?” she said.

He set down his quill, looked up, and fixed her with his warm blue gaze through the clear lenses of his glasses.

“You will refer to me as ‘Sir,’ or ‘Mr. Secretary,’ Miss Parkinson.”

She laughed.

He didn’t smile.

Pansy pursed her lips, and fought back the urge to roll her eyes.

“Alright then,” she said. “ _Mr. Secretary._ ”

He nodded slightly.

“What else can I do for you, _Sir_?”

“Take these over to Simmons for his signature,” he said, gesturing to a pile of rolled parchment, “and then I have an order of official robes that need picking up from Hart and Grumble’s Cleaners in Diagon Alley.”

He lifted the cup of tea, took a sip, and nodded in apparent approval.

“You want me to pick up your cleaning for you,” she asked blankly.

“Yes, Miss Parkinson, I do.”

“Oh. Well, it will be my pleasure, _Sir_ ,” she said.

She grabbed the pile of parchment, and headed out the door to find out who Simmons was.

Once she’d found him, slowly and peacefully balding and going grey at one of the desks behind a door on the opposite side of the office, acquired his signatures, and had Kath demonstrate how to send off the parchments via parachute to a clerk in another office on the second floor, she grabbed her handbag, put on her cape and headed into Diagon Alley to fetch Percy Weasley’s blasted laundry. 

“You’re Secretary Weasley’s new girl?” asked the young woman who handed Pansy the garment bag full of Percy’s carefully pressed robes.

“I suppose I am,” said Pansy.

The girl actually giggled.

“Good luck with that, then,” she said. “If you ever need a good cry and a cuppa, they sell an excellent raspberry scone and clotted cream over the road at Plimshaw’s bake shop.”

Pansy stood up straight.

“I’m quite sure I’ll be able to handle him,” she said. “He’s a bloody _Weasley,_ for Merlin's sake.”

The girl laughed again and shrugged, which filled Pansy with unease.

Pansy stepped lightly over the cobblestones on the way back to the Ministry, and delivered the clean robes to Percy’s office. He wanted her to hang them in the closet tucked into the front corner of the room, organized by degree of formality. Then, she was to organize her desk outside his office, and then fetch him a salad, a bowl of soup, and one chocolate biscuit from the Ministry cafeteria.

The second half of the day was taken up in a flurry of silently peeping intraoffice notes and flapping Ministry memos, while Pansy was given a vast sheet of parchment containing Percy’s schedule in a packed calendar grid. It turned out that you had little control over the form your bird notes took, and Pansy was amused to find that when she tapped her wand on each little slip of white paper, they turned into miniature crows, who opened their little beaks and cawed silently at her before they flew. She sent off a whole murder of them in the process of coordinating meeting times with several of the other higher ups across the floor and in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, about an upcoming piece of legislation in the Wizengamot that was set to impact public access to information regarding past criminal convictions.

At the end of the day, Pansy’s heels ached, and she found herself running through her mental list of eligible wizards, and how long it might take her to seduce a reasonable one into marriage, when a nondescript white bird landed on her desk, and flattened out into a smooth white square.

It read:

_My office for end of day review._

Pansy pushed aside the stack of Ministry memos she’d been working her way through, and quietly entered Percy’s office.

He had his back to her, and was spraying the leaves of one of his plants with a glass misting bottle, and wiping them down with a cloth.

“Sit, please, Miss Parkinson,” he said.

She sat.

Without looking to her, he slowly and carefully continued to mist the leaves of his plant. Outside his window, the light in the pine trees had become diffuse and pink with an unseen sunset, and a raven perched on a maple branch opened its beak and made no sound.

“As I said before, Miss Parkinson,” he began, “your presence in this office is the result of machinations in which I had no hand.”

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“And yet, mercifully, you haven’t been entirely incompetent.”

She rolled her eyes at his back.

He disappeared the bottle and cloth, and turned to face her.

“You will, of course, need to drop your cigarette habit, immediately.”

Pansy shook her head in confusion.

She hadn’t had a cigarette since that morning, as she hadn’t had the time for one at lunch. In any case, she always applied a very useful charm that quickly dissipated the smoke without a trace. As much as she would have loved to know she was sending her mother home after each visit with her wayward daughter’s bad habits sticking to her hair and clothes, she’d never said a word about it.

If Pansy’s mother couldn’t find a reason to complain, he shouldn’t have been able to tell.

“Excuse me, _Sir_?”

“You can drop the sarcasm as well, Miss Parkinson,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes.

“In all due respect, _Mr. Secretary_ ,” she said, sarcastically, crossing and uncrossing her legs at the ankles. “I don’t believe my habits outside of the office are any of your business.”

Percy stood and looked at her, and pushed his hands down into his pockets.

“In the main, that may be true, but I don’t allow anyone working in this office to smoke,” he said.

“How can you bloody well tell?” she said, too loudly.

“Come here,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“ _You heard me_.”

Pansy’s breath hitched.

He stood, unmoving, and unmoved, watching her.

Finally, as if compelled, Pansy rose from her chair, and crossed the room to stand in front of him.

He was lit from behind by that gold-pink light, and still had his hands in his pockets.

“Closer, please,” he said, and she shifted to stand nearer.

He bent his head almost imperceptibly toward her.

“You’ll permit me,” he said.

Said, not asked.

And she would. Permit him.

She nodded.

He leaned down, brought his face close to her neck, and breathed.

“Citrus,” he said, quietly, “and mango. Peony.”

He pulled back, and brought his hand close to her wrist, but stopped just before he touched it.

“May I?” he asked.

She shook her head yes again.

He wrapped his long, cool fingers around her wrist, gently, and lifted it to his nose.

He breathed in.

“Lotus, labdanum, incense,” he continued.

“Musk,” he added, and dropped his blue eyes, sharp and dispassionate, to hers.

“And, if I’m not mistaken, Muggle cigarette, probably American, to maximize the irritation to your mother,” he concluded. “The perfume is very beautiful, the tobacco is not. I won’t tolerate it in my office.”

She wasn’t sure the last time a man had the balls to try to tell her what to do. If any ever had, whoever it was sure as fucking hell wasn’t a gods damned Weasley.

What a massive cunt.

An absolute _fucking_ wanker.

A neat-minded, ice-veined despot with his stripped down office and ticking wristwatch and perfectly ordered three piece suit.

She could feel the defiance on her tongue, scratching to get out.

She looked up at him, tall and lean and angular, dry and detached and so fucking sure he was going to get what he wanted. His fingers were still around her wrist, and Pansy wanted to pull away from his grip and strike him.

She thought back to her conversation with Blaise.

Tight leather skirt.

Strain the buttons on the shirt.

She suddenly wanted nothing more than to watch this perfectly stitched up man come unraveled at the seams, and know she’d been the one to do it. 

Alright.

If Percy Weasley wanted obedience, she’d give it to him.

She dropped her chin, looked up at him through half-lidded, half-narrowed eyes, and said, very quietly, “Yes, Sir.”

His brow twitched so quickly she almost missed it.

“Good,” he said, almost inaudibly, and let go of her wrist.

He cleared his throat.

“It’s 5:00, Miss Parkinson, and you may now gather up your things and take your leave,” he said crisply. “You are expected to be at your desk and prepared to begin your work at 8 o’clock precisely, and not a moment later. If your tardiness continues, you’ll face corrective action. Is that clear?”

Pansy stared at him.

“It is, Mr. Secretary,” she said, then she spun on her heel and walked out of his door.

She Flooed home to a quiet townhouse.

She’d left her laundry on the floor, because fuck her mother.

Kicking off her heels, and pulling the black bow free from her collar, she sat down at the edge of her bed, picked up the silver cigarette case from her nightstand, and clicked it open. She pulled out a cigarette, pressed it between her lips, flicked the flint of the lighter, and brought the flame towards her mouth.

_Yes, Sir._

_Good._

She felt a shiver wind up her spine.

Her hand wavered, then she clicked the lighter closed with an angry snap, and pulled the unlit cigarette from her lips.

She sat for a long while, then stood, tossed the cigarette into the bin next to her bed, straightened her collar, and slipped her feet back into her heels. She’d need something for the nicotine withdrawals, and the Apothecary she preferred would be closing in an hour or so.

As she made her way down the sidewalk of Diagon Alley, bag over her shoulder, she found that entirely against her will, her lips had pulled into a smile.


	2. Chapter 2

“Have you added any more texts that require special handling since last month?” Pansy asked.

“The red one on the top right, Miss Parkinson.” Percy spoke without looking up from the Ministry memo unfolding itself on his desk.

He was as unreadable a person as Pansy had ever known, but she’d been working for him for over a month, and had begun to distinguish his different moods.

Today, he sounded tense.

She looked down on him from the top of the book ladder.

It was late afternoon on a glaring, sunny day in the world outside of the enchanted window behind his back, and in the light that filtered into his office, his hair was kindled into a hundred tints and shades of glinting rust.

She had a long list of tasks to accomplish before the day’s end, but for a moment, while his attention was trapped on the page, she watched him work.

He had long, elegant fingers, which moved with economy and precision across the stacks of paper he read, wrote, and signed all day long. His was the most perfect handwriting she had ever seen: the letters compact and invariable, the spaces between his words uniform, and all keeping a scrupulous, machine-like adherence to lines that only Percy could see on the paper. His signature, too, was a work of neat genius, streamlined and essential. If she hadn’t watched him produce it time and again, day after day, she’d have thought it was made with a stamp.

He handled papers like a professional card dealer, moving his documents between stacks with a fluid speed and purpose that Pansy tried not to admire. At the end of the every day, after he cleaned his desk of all objects save his inkwell, he pulled on a long black coat, straightened his tie, and made his way out the door to wherever it was a man like Percy Weasley went when he wasn’t working.

While he worked, his office was silent except for the soft, riffling noises of the paper under his hand and the scratch of his quill, both of which brought Pansy an inexplicable sense of calm.

How this man was a part of the riotous Weasley clan, Pansy had no idea.

His hair, of course, but any other similarity eluded her.

His hair.

“Would you like me to schedule a hair cut for you, Sir?” she asked, breaking the silence.

Percy reached up and rubbed his hand over the hair at the back of his head, the always tidy line of it retreating into haziness, then looked up at Pansy.

“Thank you, Miss Parkinson. That’s very attentive of you.”

Pansy nodded, and snapped her attention back to the bookshelves.

She removed the red volume without magic and placed it on Percy’s desk. After casting a levitation charm to move the remaining books, she reascended the ladder with her wand in hand.

Lifting up onto her toes and leaning forward to reach the furthest recesses of the shelf, she cast cleaning and polishing charms, and then, feeling satisfied that her work met Percy's exacting standards, dropped back down onto the balls of her feet, dusted off her pleated Tartan skirt, and turned to speak to Percy.

“Would you prefer that I finish the next section before I fetch your tea, or—”

As she looked back over her shoulder and down, he quickly leaned forward, tilted his chin toward a parchment filled with dense blocks of text lying unfurled on his desk, and began moving his quill over a signature line.

“I would prefer my tea before you move on, thank you," he said, eyes glued to his parchment. The tops of his ears had flushed pink.

After replacing the books, Pansy went to fetch Percy’s tea.

“I’d like you to go to the archive and pull these cases for me.” He handed her a handwritten list as she placed his cup and saucer down on his desk, “And then I’ll need you in the criminal cases review meeting for notes, and to handle further scheduling with Blumenthal and Gable’s secretaries. You can finish the shelves while I’m in my end of day meeting with Zhao and the recidivism task force.”

“You don’t want me to finish the shelves now?” she asked, gesturing over her shoulder. “I’ve only the last bookcase left. It won’t take me another thirty minutes. It takes ten minutes just to get down to the archives, and I was hoping to get your lunch with the Director of Policy for the Minister’s office scheduled prior to the two o’ clock— ”

“No.” His interruption was blunt. “I’d like the cases pulled now. And the shelves finished later.”

“Yes, Sir.” She shook her head in irritation.

The archives were in a series of low-ceilinged, catacomb-like rooms adjacent to the courtrooms on Level 10. They were dry, dark and filled with the sweet, earthy smell of old paper. Pansy spent a frustrating three-quarters of an hour combing through the endless shelves of parchment, until at last she clambered up the stairs from Level 10 and into the shaking rear elevator with an awkward armload of dusty case files checked out to Second Permanent Secretary Weasley.

The two o’ clock meeting began ten minutes late, and once it was underway, Pansy found herself sitting with her quill out, taking meeting notes across the shining mahogany table from an agitated Percy, who kept twisting his fingers around the button on his left shirt cuff.

“My office has discovered an apparent sentencing pattern around crimes committed by vampires versus similar offences committed by non-vampires”—Jonathan Gable from Magical Creatures passed around clipped stacks of parchment to everyone attending—“which may constitute serious, systemic rights violations. I’ve prepared a dossier.”

Jonathan was Muggle-born, about the same age as Percy, with olive skin, a head of glossy black hair swept back in a casual arc from his forehead, and only a few inches of height on Pansy. He was a genial, smiling fixture at the Atrium tea cart in the morning, muscular and spare from competing in triathlons, whatever those were. He was the son of a Muggle diplomat and had gone to Ilvermorny, which complicated his accent. Pansy had heard the cabal of mail room witches and the occasional wizard talking about him with unconcealed interest in the cafeteria line more than once.

He had his easy smile turned on Pansy throughout the meeting, which she tried to ignore.

Once the meeting adjourned, Pansy left Percy in the conference room for his three o’ clock, and returned to his office to finish dusting the last bookcase.

She’d left her red open-toe pumps at the bottom of the ladder, and had just begun removing the top row of books when she heard a rap at the open door. She turned to find Jonathan leaning in Percy’s doorway.

“Hello, Miss Parkinson.” He smile was both bright and unaffected. “I’m afraid I’ve come to grovel at your feet.”

Pansy scowled.

“Nothing that serious, I promise,” he said. “But my secretary Mr. Drees has suddenly come down ill enough to go home, and unfortunately he was to take notes in my three o’clock with the Beast Division. I find myself in need of a willing body, and was wondering whether I might borrow Weasley’s best girl without asking.”

He tilted his head, and Pansy marveled that even his flirting was done with a charming, innocuous sincerity.

“I’m not Secretary Weasley’s best anything,” she said, “and I believe that’s called stealing. In any case, I’m in the middle of a project that I’m expected to have finished before he returns at four o’clock.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate. I promise we’ll make it a short one. What’s Weasley going to do, anyway, hold you over after class and force you to write lines?”

Pansy didn’t return his laugh.

“I suppose not.” She slid the volume in her hand back into place. “Let me gather my things.”

“Splendid! We’re down in Meeting Room 6 on the 4th level.”

He turned back around on his way out the door.

“Your hair is very nice today, by the way. The—” He gestured at the back of his head.

"Ponytail?"

"That's the one." His smile broadened. "It's awfully sweet."

Though the meeting was brief, it was held in a crowded, overheated room, and Pansy was forced to sit in the back, writing against the surface of an adjustable speaker’s stand that Jonathan procured for her from a closet.

By the time she returned to Percy’s office and his infernal shelves, she felt _dewy_ , as her mother called it, and it was a quarter to four o’clock.

She rushed through the remaining shelves until all that was left was the one on the bottom. It was while she was on her hands and knees, head bent in the most undignified fashion all the way to the floor and carpet scratching at her bare shins, that Percy’s door opened.

As she arched her stiff back and looked over her shoulder, she saw Percy standing in the doorway with his hand on the doorknob, looking at her.

For a long moment, he didn’t move.

Then he let go of the door, moved across the room with purposeful strides and set his leather portfolio down on his desk.

“I believe you were told to finish this project while I was in the meeting." He began unpacking a bundle of parchment onto his desk.

“I was interrupted”—she ducked down into the shelf again—“by Mr. Gable. His secretary isn’t well, and he needed me for his three o’clock.”

Percy stopped moving.

“Gable?” He managed to make a scant two syllables terse and cool. “What in Merlin’s name was Jonathan Gable doing up here asking after you? His offices are two floors down.”

“As I said”—she ran her wand over the joined wood in the corners—“he needed a secretary. I suppose I was the only one available.”

Percy scoffed. “I'm sure you were."

His chair creaked as he sat down, and then she heard the sound of a parchment scroll being opened.

“I expect you to do your job efficiently,” he said. “I can’t have books cluttering my desk while I'm trying to work.”

Pansy ducked her head out of the shelf, sat back on her heels and looked up at him in disbelief.

“My apologies, Mr. Secretary." She frowned, spiked through with indignation. “I’ll be finished momentarily, and your desk will be all yours.”

Pansy ducked her head back down and started on the polishing spell.

She heard him get up from his chair, cross over to the bookshelves, pull down a text, and return to sitting.

The pages of his book rustled while she watched the wood take on a satisfying luster.

When that was finished, she levitated most of the books back onto the shelf, then picked up the volumes requiring special handling from the corner of Percy’s desk, dropped to her knees, and bent over to shelve them in their proper places.

Before she could stand again, she heard Percy’s book snap shut. He rose from his chair, and started toward the door.

“I’ll be back shortly,” he said. “When you’ve finished, please carry on with the transcription of my notes on the Marley case. I need them prior to the floor debate in the Wizengamot on Thursday.”

Pansy did as she was told, and when he returned half an hour later, he sailed past her desk without noticing her at all.

She rolled up the Marley notes, and when she walked them into his office, he didn’t even look up from his scroll when she placed them on top of the incoming documents pile on his desk. She walked out without a word, and pulled his door to.

It was the end of the day, fifteen minutes before five o’ clock, when a memo fluttered down on her desk. She tapped her wand at its lengthwise seam and it opened for her, lying flat and without a hint of a fold.

It was from Human Resources, addressed to her.

Pansy read it over in a cursory fashion, and then again, slow and careful. Once she had done, she stood, and slammed her way into Percy Weasley’s office.

He was standing at his bookshelves, with a slim wine-colored volume open in his hands, as she marched over to slap the memo down on his desk.

“What the _fuck_ is this?”

Percy stared at her, then down at the memo, and snapped the book shut.

“To begin with, you will not use that kind of language in my office again."

“Pardon me, Sir,” she said, her face burning with anger, “but I’m a little confused as to why I’ve received a memo from Human Resources directing me to check in with a female officer to review the dress code before I leave at the end of the day.”

Percy turned and slid the text back into its place on the shelf, his movements unhurried and dispassionate, and walked around to sit at his desk.

“I assure you that is a question better asked down in Human Resources.” He spoke with a perfunctory air of dismissal, without looking up from his work.

While she stared at him, breathing hard around her growing fury, he brought a fingertip to the bridge of his glasses, and adjusted them against his nose.

He picked up a quill and began jotting down notes in the margins of a thick stack of parchment from a case file.

“Who’s complained?” she asked.

“I’m not interested in continuing this discussion.” He maintained an unswerving focus on his writing. “HR is perfectly capable of working with you to maintain the professional integrity of this office.”

“The ‘professional integrity’,” she repeated.

He reached up and scratched at his right earlobe.

“It was you.” Her voice rose. “I’m being called down for a talking to because you’ve made some kind of complaint about the way I dress.”

He continued at his work without responding to her in any way.

“If you have a problem with the way I look, Weasley—”

The whole of his most acute attention immediately turned to her.

“—you could have bloody well told me yourself," she said, her breath hard and uneven. "You’ve never once hesitated to let me know when my work isn’t up to your standards. Why this scurrying off to an office seven floors down?”

“As I have said, Miss Parkinson, this is not an appropriate topic for me to discuss with you."

“It’s not appropriate?” Her laugh was reedy with sarcasm. “Where’s that famous Gryffindor pluck?" She crossed her arms over her chest and waited, but he said nothing. "Alright, if you won’t tell me yourself, perhaps I’ll walk down to Jonathan Gable’s office and ask him for his opinion on the way I dress. He’s attentive to detail, and he was rather taken with my hair today. I’m sure he’ll have a list of suggestions.”

She turned to walk out the door, then jumped when it slammed to before her.

Behind her, Percy’s chair creaked as he stood.

“Alright, Miss Parkinson,” he said, cutting and precise. "If this is what you want so very much, it's yours."

Pansy's pulse leapt as she faced the room again.

Percy set down his wand, meticulous as ever, then walked around to stand in front of his desk.

“Come here.” It was not a request.

She stalled, then moved nearer to him, hesitant and unsure, and stopped an arm’s length away.

Her heart drummed in her ribs hard enough that she could have counted the beats if she'd wished to, and she watched with something like awe as his chest lifted and fell with his own apparent agitation beneath the smooth white surface of his button up shirt.

"On your knees,” he said.

Pansy’s pulse stuttered.

“What?”

“I said, get down on your knees, Miss Parkinson.”

She watched his throat move as he swallowed.

The moment felt drawn out, stretched thin to the point of breaking.

She wondered if she ought to be angry, or afraid, but to her astonishment, she was overcome by a feeling of anxious anticipation, like he was about to give her something she’d been promised, if she only would show him how patient she could be.

She recalled without meaning to her first day as his secretary, when his fingers wrapped around her wrist: soft, and hard.

She grabbed onto his gaze, gated and level, and held fast to it as she dropped to her knees on the rug before him.

Looking up at him from below, she watched his eyes grow wide.

As she waited, she let her eyes sweep over his face, tracing the perfect, flawed line of his mouth, and the pale curve of his jaw, every feature schooled into place by nothing more than his calm and resolute will.

Without warning, a sensation rose up inside her.

It was like a wave of cool water rolling through and around her: the slow surge of a rising tide lifting her and carrying her on its surface.

For a brief moment, she struggled.

And then she let go.

She gave in to the current, let it draw her on where it wanted her to go, and discovered that there—on her knees, for him—she was held and made safe.

He could say whatever he liked.

Tell her what she'd done wrong.

What she'd done right.

He could tell her what to do.

He wouldn't need to say please.

He could tell her to unbutton her shirt.

He could tell her to unbutton his trousers.

To take his cock in her hand.

In her mouth.

She would do it.

And she'd be grateful.

She waited.

"Your skirt is too short, Miss Parkinson." He cleared his throat. “Your hem ought to be touching the floor.”

She glanced at the hem of her Tartan skirt, halfway down the length of her thigh.

“Yes, Sir,” she said, with her eyes still downcast.

She lifted them again.

“I’m sorry, Sir.”

He pressed his eyes closed for a beat, then opened them.

“And your blouse is open too low." His eyes dropped down to where the top three buttons of her white cotton blouse were undone. “I can…” he stopped. The fingers of his right hand flexed. “Your bra should not be visible from any vantage point.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Your legs should never be bare in the office.”

She nodded.

“And the toes of your high heels are open. You'll find in the employee handbook, page four, section two, that Ministry policy states that closed toed shoes are mandatory."

“I’m sorry, Sir.”

He breathed hard.

“I will expect you to be at work tomorrow morning with each of these corrected.”

“Yes, Sir.”

He nodded.

“Good. Well. I’ll—”

On a sudden impulse, she spoke.

"Would you like to tell me what to wear?”

His brow furrowed.

“What?”

"If you wanted to, you could tell me what to wear, Mr. Secretary.”

“I can’t—” He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

But he could.

She wanted him to.

“Please.” She said it low and quiet. Just for him.

As the second hand of his watch twitched through a soundless half minute, he searched her eyes, as though if he looked long enough, and hard enough, he would be able to read her mind as easily as he read every cramped page of parchment that moved across his desk.

Finally, he breathed in, slow and deep, and out again. He lifted his hand, dragged it through his hair, and dropped it to his side.

“The knee-length black skirt,” he began, then coughed, slight and dry, and swallowed. “The fitted one. With the high waist.”

She nodded.

“And the pale pink blouse. With the small floral print and fabric-covered buttons.”

She waited.

“The heels with the ankle strap," he said. "The ones you wore on your first day."

“Yes, Sir.” She watched a shiver move across his shoulders.

“And stockings.” He paused. “Black.”

“Do you like them with a seam down the back, Sir?”

“Yes,” he said before she'd finished asking.

"And my knickers?"

He stared and said nothing at all.

"They could be black."

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

“My hair?”

The edge in his eyes softened, and melted away.

“Have you been letting it grow?"

"I have."

"But you'll leave the fringe."

"If you'd like."

"I would."

He lifted his hand, brought his thumb to within an increment from her bottom lip, then dropped it just before he touched her.

“That's a good—" He broke off. "That will be all, Miss Parkinson. You may leave for the day.”

Pansy rose from her knees.

“Yes, Sir."

She walked to the door, opened it, and paused for a moment in the doorway, clenching her unsteady hands together in front of herself.

She spoke without turning around. “Thank you, Mr. Secretary."

There was nothing behind her but the sound of him breathing.

It was after five o’clock, and the office had nearly emptied. Her hands continued to shake as she straightened her work space with mercenary efficiency and gathered up her bag.

As she started to walk away from her desk, he spoke.

“Good evening, Miss Parkinson.”

She paused.

“Good evening, Sir."

She waited, and when he said nothing more, she made her way out to the lifts.

“You’ve become a willing servant to your job, Pansy,” said Tracey. “I ought to check you for the Imperius.”

“Don’t exaggerate.” Pansy had to shout over the music to be heard.

“Am I, though?” asked Tracey. “What are you thinking about right now?”

Pansy shrugged and looked away.

It had been two weeks since she’d been out at all. She’d worked hard to eliminate her morning tardiness, and had recently struggled to recall what it was she found so compelling about night life before her job at the Ministry.

“Incidentally, there’s a fellow over there that keeps looking at you,” said Tracey, rotating her coupe glass to avoid the curl of grapefruit peel at the edge, and sipping at her pink daiquiri.

“Are you sure he’s not looking at you?” asked Pansy.

If Pansy was confident in her ability to bring home a beautiful man whenever she damn well felt like it, Tracey was a true savant.

She was luxuriously built, had brown skin that seemed to glow golden from the inside, and more innate easiness and style than any other Slytherin girl during all of their years at Hogwarts, which Pansy’s mother frequently liked to point out. She was clever and light-hearted and a very great deal of _fun. She was_ also an order of magnitude less likely to kick a man in the bollocks without warning than Pansy was, which most men seemed to appreciate.

“No, I know a Parkinson man when I see one,” insisted Tracey. “This one is going to walk over here in ten minutes and ask you to step on his throat.”

Curious, Pansy turned a casual eye toward the opposite side of the room, where she saw the smiling face and black hair of Jonathan Gable sitting at the U-shaped bar on the other side of the dance floor.

“Gods,” said Pansy. “I know him. He works down in Magical Creatures.”

“Oh!" Tracey considered Jonathan with a new interest. “Your dedication to your work takes on new, genital dimensions.”

“It isn’t like that. He’s perfectly fine, but sex is an unequivocal no.”

“Mm hm." Tracey raised an eyebrow at Pansy mid-sip. “Because you certainly haven’t taken a baker’s dozen of dark-haired men with attractive mouths to your bed in the last—” Tracy tilted her head and looked at the ceiling “—six months.”

“That is a gross overestimation,” said Pansy. “In the last _year_ , perhaps, and that’s really pushing it.” She’d ordered a gimlet but wasn’t in the mood, and contented herself with spinning the cocktail glass around in circles and watching the condensation make interlocking rings on the glass table top. “Anyway, if I ever find one worth having for more than a few nights, rest assured that I’ll keep him.”

It was Tracey’s turn to shrug.

“All I’m saying is that you have a type, and that man over there, looking at you right now, is that type,” said Tracey. “You like nice, dark-haired boys who you can wrap around your finger, and who fuck like sailors with an hour of shore leave.”

“I have no desire to find out how Jonathan Gable fucks, below decks or on shore.” Pansy scowled.

"Whatever lies get you through your day, my ill-natured little tart," said Tracey. "Oh, hello!" She sat up suddenly, her interest piqued. "Is that a Weasley? That’s a Weasley."

Pansy’s belly performed a cheeky somersault.

She feigned indifference and waited for Tracey to continue.

“Over there, at the other end of the bar, with that fit witch in the red dress,” said Tracey. "Gods, do you think she'd tell us her skincare routine? I'll bet it's complicated."

Pansy turned and scanned the length of the bar until her eyes came to rest on Percy Weasley.

He sat next as straight as always on a bar stool next to Madeline Zhao, a public defender with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. He wore a deep blue three piece suit without a tie, the top button of his pale blue shirt undone, and swished the citrus rind around in his old fashioned.

Madeline Zhao’s left hand hand rested on a martini, and her right rested on Percy Weasley’s left thigh.

She tossed her waist-length black hair while she laughed at something Percy said.

“Is that your dismal Secretary Weasley? It can’t be. That one looks uptight, but after we’d had those two bottles of wine at yours, you said Weasley looked like—what was it you shouted at me? ‘A freckled harbinger of the death of all of life’s spontaneous delight’?"

"I was very drunk."

"That man right there is more than a bit dishy. _She’s_ certainly ready for a mouthful, anyway,” said Tracey, nodding toward Madeline.

Pansy drained her gimlet in two gasping swallows, stood, and pulled Tracey to her feet.

“Dance with me." She drew Tracey’s arm over her shoulder and led her to the edge of the dance floor.

As she watched Tracey make a dramatic, playful circle around her at the end of an outstretched arm, she tried to block out the last two weeks.

She’d sent a single blank paper crow flying through the window over Percy’s door at the end of each day.

And within five minutes, every day, a little nameless white bird had come back, its insides filled in with his meticulous hand.

His desires were highly specific.

_The green short sleeved dress with the buttons up the back. Green heels. The gold pendant necklace with your initial. Red knickers._

And his demands reflected his moods.

Once, when he saw a decision in the Wizengamot go the way he liked, he spent the day relaxed, almost smiling, and it was:

_Navy floral dress. Nude heels. The amber drop earrings. Pale pink knickers. Curl your hair?_

On another day, he wanted her all in black:

_Black pencil skirt, tight. Black sheer button up shirt with the round collar. Black stockings. Black dragonskin heels with the red soles. Black knickers. Lace. Small. That dark chypre you wore last week, only behind your knees. Ponytail. Red lipstick._

He called her in for the slightest thing all day long; sent his tea back to be remade; excused her from a meeting; seemed agitated and distracted while she was in his office; and finally, sent her off on an end of day errand in Diagon Alley that took her out of the building so long he was gone by the time she made it back.

Each night, as she lay out the substance of his demands on her bed, her heart hummed with its impatience for more.

She waited for him to tell her to touch him.

Or tell her to allow him to touch her.

To get down on her knees again.

But he never did.

And now she danced, on a Saturday night, in a plunging velvet dress with a hem that hit at the tops of her thighs, wearing a pair of gold glitter pumps that he did not choose, while he sat, and drank, and laughed with somebody who was allowed to touch him.

Someone who was not her.

Pansy wrapped her arms around Tracey, and moved to the banal beat of a song made for dancing, so she didn’t have to think.

“You quite well, my sour pigeon?” asked Tracey, running a hand over Pansy’s arm.

Before she could make answer with a non-answer, a male voice Pansy knew intruded.

“Miss Parkinson?”

Pansy looked up at the smiling face of Jonathan Gable, and wished she remembered what it was about dark-haired men with kind mouths that she liked so much.

“Hello, I’m Jonathan,” he said, holding out his hand to Tracey. “I work at the Ministry with Miss Parkinson.”

“I’m Tracey, and Pansy and I are just friendly friends, you can have her if you like." Tracey put her head on Pansy’s shoulder and looked up at Jonathan with a look of exaggerated innocence.

Pansy fumed.

Flirtatious cow.

"Oh! That’s...ha.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Would you like to dance?"

No.

She moved to give him space to dance with Tracey—soft, beautiful Tracey with the glorious breasts that Blaise would never know—but he turned to Pansy instead, and wrapped a hand around her hip.

Tracey let her go with the I-told-you-so look Pansy despised her for making, and adored her enough to allow. 

“You look beyond, _beyond_ gorgeous,” he said, looking nervous and hopeless.

Pansy let him pull her in close. She dropped her arms to her sides, tilted her head back, and allowed him flow into the hollow spaces of her body.

His leg moved between hers.

His arms looped around her waist.

His face bent down to the arch of her neck.

“You smell gorgeous, too,” he said. “Your perfume is incredible, it smells like ... gods, what is that?”

Citrus. Pepper. May rose. Mimosa. Sandalwood. Oakmoss.

She turned her face away sharply when he lifted his head and moved his mouth too close to hers. “I want a drink."

“Alright."

He grabbed her hand and led her behind him to the bar. Pansy looked back over her shoulder at Tracey, who laughed at her without reserve.

Jonathan sat on a bar stool, pulled her to sit next to him, and turned to face her, notching his knee between hers.

“What are you drinking?” he asked, leaning in close to be heard over the music.

Pansy didn’t really want a drink. She thought perhaps what she really wanted was to go home.

“A dry martini, up,” she said.

Jonathan got the bartender’s attention and made their order, handing over a handful of coins.

“Has there been any movement on the house-elf basic education legislation?” she asked, sliding her fingers absently down the stem of her glass.

Jonathan sent her chastising look while he picked up his pint of ale.

“Do you really want to talk shop?” He nudged her knee with his. “This is my first time getting you alone outside the office. I’d much prefer to hear about what you get up to when you’re not being ordered around by Percy Weasley.” He took another long drink, then sputtered at the tail end of a swallow. “Oh, gods, speak of the devil." His voice rose as he called over Pansy's right shoulder. "Hullo there, Weasley."

“What?” Pansy started to turn, but stopped herself. She fixed her stare on the sweating glass in front of her, and poked at the bottom of it with the olive spear.

“Gable.”

Percy stepped into view on Pansy’s right.

He was alone for the moment, standing next to them with his hands in his pockets. His shirt was minutely wrinkled, and Pansy thought he must have run a hand through his hair once or twice, but he still looked above everything, cool and unbothered.

He pinned Pansy with a stare.

“Are you going to need help getting home?” His eyes flicked to her drink.

Jonathan dropped his hand to Pansy’s forearm where it rested on the bar.

"I think she’ll manage," he said.

Percy looked at him indifferently, then glanced down to where Jonathan’s knee was pressed between Pansy’s.

"Miss Parkinson?"

“Please, don’t trouble yourself, Secretary Weasley.” She brought the martini she didn’t want to her lips and taking a long drink. She swallowed, and set the glass down. "I'm sure Mr. Gable is perfectly willing to take me home. Feel free to enjoy your evening with Miss Zhao, knowing that I'm in very capable hands."

Percy’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t answer her.

“I didn’t know you were seeing Madeline again,” said Jonathan.

“We’re just out for a drink." Percy shifted on his feet.

Jonathan lifted his glass. “Cheers, Weasley. To drinks out with beautiful women." He smiled at Pansy.

Percy looked like he was going to say something, then thought better of it. He gave them both a curt nod.

“Miss Parkinson. Mr. Gable,” he said, "Have a lovely evening.”

Jonathan tipped his glass in a convivial goodbye as Percy made his way back to his place at the other end of the bar.

“Go to the cinema with me,” said Johnathan out of nowhere.

“What?” asked Pansy.

“The cinema.” His smile widened with enthusiasm. “It’s Muggle, and wonderful. There’s nothing like it in the wizarding world. There’s one called Spider-man, coming out next week. It’s about a ... wizard, I suppose, with the powers of a spider, who wears very tight pajamas and a mask to cover his face so that no one knows he’s a teenager. Come to dinner, and the cinema. We'll eat popcorn. And then I’ll make you dessert.”

Pansy stiffened.

Fucking, she knew how to do. For a night, or two, sometimes even four or five.

Masked teenage boys with the powers of spiders, dinner, fucking _popcorn,_ and dessert, she did not believe she was capable of.

“I'm not really sure about dinner, Mr. Gable."

“Call me Johnathan, please. I ... ” he looked away, then back again. “I like you very much, Miss Parkinson. Pansy. I’d like to take you out. If you tell me no, I won’t ask again, but I'm hoping you'll say yes. I think I can make a reasonable promise that you'll have a nice time.”

It would be.

Nice.

She didn't want nice.

She wanted ...

_Black pencil skirt, tight._

_Black knickers._

_Lace._

_Small._

_Ponytail._

_On your knees._

_Open your mouth._

_Say “Ah.”_

Pansy shivered.

Over Jonathan’s left shoulder, she saw Percy and Madeline at the front door.

He helped her into a black leather jacket, and as they turned to leave, he put his hand on her waist.

Pansy grabbed Jonathan’s collar, pulled him in, and kissed him.

He was surprised, but recovered, and it wasn’t long before she convinced him that she wanted more than soft, chaste connection.

She licked at his lip, and drew him into her, pulling his hair between her fingers.

Take it all, she thought.

Take me home.

Take me.

_Take._

He broke away, breathing hard, and gave her one of his ready smiles.

“I … ” he began, drawing his hand down over his mouth. “That was … ”

He looked stunned.

“Will you go out with me?” he asked again, still catching his breath.

Pansy didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t had a kiss that ended in plans for a fucking night out with popcorn since her 4th year at Hogwarts, but somehow saying “Come home with me, right now, and lick my pussy until I forget my own name,” didn’t have the right ring to it.

“I’ll think about it,” she said. It was, in the moment, easier than "No," and kinder than "Yes, because I find that my heart’s been nicked, and you’ll do for a plaster."

“I’ll take it.” His eyes were very kind. “Does this mean we’re friends now?”

“Do you kiss your friends, Mr. Gable?”

He laughed. “Not usually. But I do like to be friends with the women I kiss.”

Fucking wanker.

He thought she was a nice girl under it all, didn’t he; the girl with the tart tongue and the sweet ponytail who was good at her job.

 _Ponytail_.

_I'll wrap my hand around it._

_Hands and knees._

_Take what I give you._

_Like a good ..._

_Such a good, good ..._

She clenched her thighs together.

“I’m going to go home now, Jonathan. By myself.”

His eyebrows rose in amusement.

Just the suggestion that something else could have happened surprised him.

Awfully sweet, she thought.

“I’ll see you on Monday,” she said.

She began to move away, then paused, leaned back in, and put a kiss against his cheek.

"You called me Jonathan."

A smile pulled up the corner of his mouth as she left him behind at the bar.

She arrived in the office, bold-faced, at 8:07 on Monday morning.

“Ooh, look at you today, Pansy,” said Kath at the front desk, adjusting her shapeless mohair cardigan. “That dress is something else, isn’t it, Ines? Cream looks so well against her skin, doesn’t it? She’s not half pale as parchment, and I like the little black—” she made a gesture like poking herself all over the torso “—polka dots. She looks like one of those Muggle Hollywood femme fatals.”

“Fatales, Kath." Ines nodded in agreement. “ _Very_ nice, Miss Parkinson. Lunch date?”

“No, I just pulled it out of the back of my closet,” said Pansy, which was true. Her closet was very deep.

Percy had sent her blank note back the previous Friday, with instructions for what to wear on Monday.

 _The white cotton knee length dress. Rose absolue, wrists, neck. Everything else: surprise me._

He must have been feeling sentimental.

Pansy’s surprise for Percy was that he could go play dress up with Madeline Zhao for all she cared, and she’d give Jonathan Gable’s polite cock some food for thought in a tight, _tight_ satin dress, with a low neckline that offered up her breasts for contemplation.

She wore it with her red, open-toed heels, and left her legs bare.

She pulled her hair up in a ponytail.

_Awfully sweet._

“Can I have some of these?” Pansy gestured to Kath’s pile of pastel-colored blank intraoffice parchment squares. “I’ve run out.”

“Has Secretary Weasley loosened up about you using anything other than the white ones? He’s always been such a stickler about that with his secretaries.” Kath handed over a stack of notes.

“It’s a new day,” said Pansy. “Thanks.”

She fixed him his tea: three sugars, and a meager splash of milk.

She brought it to him lukewarm.

“Good morning, Mr. Secretary.” She schooled her voice into an austere professionalism.

He looked up.

He wore his most basic black three piece suit, with a black tie and white shirt. It was still impeccable, but he typically wore it when he was waiting on the rest of his suits to come back from Hart and Grumble’s.

He looked tired, and she thought she could see a tiny pink shadow on his chin. If she didn’t know him better, it looked like he might have nicked himself shaving, and quickly healed it.

“I have the notes for your 10 o’clock with the Warden of Azkaban prepared,” she said, putting down the rolled parchment.

She set down his tea, walked to the front of his desk, and waited.

“Is there anything else I can do for you right now, Sir?”

He said nothing.

“Alright. If that’s all, I’m going to go down to Level 4 to see Mr. Drees about the files you requested on the Didsbury staking case. After that, I’ll be fetching the additional case histories you requested from the archives. If there’s anything you require immediate assistance with before your meeting, I’ve told Kath and Ines to expect a memo.”

Percy leaned forward in his seat, and adjusted his glasses.

He was completely unreadable.

“That’s it, then?” he asked.

“What else would you like there to be?”

He interlocked his fingers, and brought them to his chin.

“Is this about—”

“I ought to be moving along, Mr. Secretary, if I’m going to accomplish what I’d like before lunch."

His jaw tightened.

“Alright, Miss Parkinson."

At that, she left him.

She spent her morning dragging out every task she could concoct for herself away from Percy’s office.

Jonathan wasn’t on Level 4, but she ran into him at the lifts, and was pleased to watch patches of pink bloom on his neck and spread upward when he saw her.

“That dress is …” he began, and never finished.

Percy took his lunch out of the office, and had meetings most of the afternoon, so it wasn’t until the end of the day that she found herself sitting at her desk, sending him a little pink crow with a question about his calendar.

_Lunch on the 7th: restaurant reservation?_

She received a plain white bird in response.

_Please cancel. Please refrain from using pink parchment in future._

_Tuesday lunches through rest of month: please advise restaurant for reservations._

_Please cancel all. Blue parchment is not my preference. Additional white parchment can be located in supply room if needed._

_Tuesday lunches cancelled._

_Yellow parchment is completely unacceptable._

_Your mother owled: Sunday dinner at Burrow._

_Please owl conditional acceptance pending progress of kitchen renovation at my flat. No blue parchment._

_Memo attached from Ms. Zhao re: cancellation of Tuesday lunches. Please advise._

_If you need additional white parchment, please come into my office and get some._

_Your mother owled: will you bring a guest to dinner?_

_No. Sending memo to Mrs. Guerrero re: white parchment supply._

_Confirmed, no plus one Weasley family dinner._

_If I get another piece of yellow parchment through that window, I swear on Merlin’s book that I will_

_You’ll what?_

_Miss Parkinson, see me in my office immediately._

She walked in with her chin held up.

“Close the door." His voice was quiet and businesslike.

He sat at his desk, his hands moving with purpose over stacks of parchment, sorting his papers before he left at the end of the day.

He did not look up at her as he spoke.

“You arrived in this office at 8:07 this morning,” he began. Wand out, he sent the remaining papers one by one from his desk into a narrow filing shelf against the wall.

“Did I, Sir?”

He tilted his eyes up to her without moving his head, then looked back down.

“Are the expectations attached to your position unclear?” he asked.

“No, Sir."

“Then please explain to me, Miss Parkinson, why I have been drinking cold, sweet, nearly black tea all day.”

She said nothing.

His desk was nearly clear.

“Mrs. Guerrero informs me that there is a large stack of white parchment in the supply room.”

She stared at him, and clenched her hands together in front of her.

“And why is it that have I sat at this desk, watching you flit around this office in a pair of fuck me heels and a dress that’s fed the tawdry imagination of every overgrown boy you’ve passed on the lifts between here and Level 10, when I’ve been perfectly clear about the degree of professionalism I expect in the appearance of my personal secretary?"

Pansy gritted her teeth and glared at him.

He finished with every paper on his desk but one.

He picked it up, glanced at it, then laid it down in the center of his desk.

At last, he looked at her.

“You will read this to me,” he said. “Out loud.”

Pansy twisted her fingers together.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Sir.”

“There’s nothing to understand.” He gestured at the paper. “Read it. Out loud.”

She crossed the room, and moved to pick it up.

“Leave the paper on the desk.”

“I’m sorry, Sir?”

“I said, leave the paper on the desk.”

On the other side of his spectacles, his blue eyes told her nothing.

She bent over until she could make out the printed script of the page, a copy of part of the Ministry employee manual she had tossed into one of her desk drawers and never looked at.

As she opened her mouth to begin reading, he interrupted.

“Put your elbows on the desk, Miss Parkinson.”

“I—”

“Do as you’re told.”

“Yes, Sir.”

She leaned down on her elbows.

“Palms flat against the desk.”

She complied.

He was close enough that she could see the group of tiny freckles on the back of his left hand.

“Now read,” he said.

She looked up at him, and his face remained unreadable. She brought her eyes to the page in front of her.

“Ministry employees will arrive prepared to commence work at their scheduled start time,” she began.

He stood, shrugged out of his jacket, and draped it over the back of his chair, so that he was in his waistcoat, tie, and shirtsleeves.

“Employees must inform their supervisor of absences, late arrivals, or early departures each day ... ”

He unbuttoned his left shirt cuff, and folded it over three times, until it was rolled to just below his elbow.

“ ... in accordance with Ministry procedure.”

He unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt on the right, and rolled it to match the sleeve on the left.

“Unscheduled absences, tardiness, and unscheduled early departures ... ”

He walked around his desk, until he stood directly behind her.

“ ... or failure to provide notification to a supervisor … ”

She heard a movement, a pair of barely audible metallic clicks, and then he set down his neatly folded spectacles on the desk near the tips of the fingers of Pansy's left hand.

“ ... will result in corrective action … ”

She heard the lock to his office slide into place, and he cast a silencing spell.

“ ... up to and including termination of employment.”

She could almost taste her own anticipation, sweet and thick on her tongue.

She'd waited.

She'd been so patient.

She'd been so—

The first slap of his hand against the flesh of her arse sent a shockwave through her entire body.

He wasn’t gentle.

Under the force of him, she jerked forward, chafing her elbows on the desk, and gasped out loud. The surface of her skin bloomed under his hand with a sharp heat so unexpected and intense she felt like she might start to cry.

She looked back over her shoulder, eyes wide with surprise. 

“Read it again, Miss Parkinson.” His face was impassive, but the pale skin of his neck was flushed, and she could see the breath visibly moving through him.

She returned her eyes to the paper, but now as she read, her voice shook.

“Ministry employees will arrive prepared to commence work at their scheduled start time.”

The second slap was just as hard as the first, this time against the other side of her arse, and she cried out again, a high, incredulous whine that she couldn’t control or contain. He answered her with a third, even harder smack in the same place he’d put the first.

She stopped and gulped air into her rattling lungs.

“Keep reading, Miss Parkinson.”

“Employees must inform their supervisor of absences, late arrivals, or early departures each day ... ”

_Four._

The fabric of her dress was so thin.

“ ... in accordance with Ministry procedure.”

_Five. Six. Seven._

Her breath was audibly ragged now, and her flesh burned beyond anything she could have imagined.

“Unscheduled absences, tardiness, and unscheduled early departures … ”

_Eight. Nine. Ten._

She was going to cry.

“ ... or failure to provide notification to a supervisor … ”

 _Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen_ , alternating sides and in quick succession, with a harsh cry breaking from her on the last.

“ ... will result in corrective action … ”

_Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen._

She would not cry.

“ ... up to and including … ”

_Eighteen._

She would not cry.

“ ... termination … ”

_Nineteen._

She would not cry.

“ ... of employment.”

_Twenty._

She gasped wildly on the last, hard strike, her elbows jolting against the desk, and then he collapsed over her, holding himself up by his left hand next to hers.

Two small, hot tears leaked from the outside corners of Pansy’s eyes as she fought to catch hold of the breath skittering through her lungs.

He dropped his forehead down against the back of her left shoulder.

His voice was thin and hoarse. “You kissed him.”

Her legs quaked under her.

“Yes.”

He breathed out.

“Did you let him fuck you?”

A pair of fresh tears escaped from her.

“No.”

His next breath seeped warm and heavy through the fabric of her dress. He smoothed his hand in a soft and gradual touch over the right side of her arse.

“Did you take her home?” she asked. She closed her eyes. "Did you fuck her?"

She waited for his answer.

He rolled his head from side to side against her shoulder.

“No.”

His thumb traced a spectral line along the outside edge of her little finger.

She arched her head to the side: an invitation that he accepted, moving his mouth into the space behind her ear.

“You did so beautifully.” His hand still soothed across her backside, and his lips moved so close to her skin that she felt more than heard the words, low and spent, as he formed them. “You're such a good girl.”

Pansy’s eyes dropped closed, and she exhaled.

She turned her face toward him, searching for his mouth, but he was already gone, grabbing his glasses from the surface of the desk, and lifting away from her.

She heard him unsilence the room, and the lock to his door slide open.

“I believe that will be all for the day, Miss Parkinson,” he said, slipping his glasses back over his ears as he moved around his desk.

He began to unroll his sleeves.

Pansy looked at him in disbelief.

“You may wish to straighten yourself up before you head to the lifts.” He fastened the buttons on his cuffs with cool efficiency.

He lifted his suit jacket from the back of his chair, pulled it back over his shoulders, and tugged his lapels into place.

Pansy rose from her arms.

“Thank you, Sir,” she said numbly as he sat back down at his desk.

He nodded.

“I’m pleased that we were able to clarify rules and expectations."

“Yes, Sir.”

“Shall I send notes on appropriate attire for tomorrow?” he asked, tucking the Ministry attendance policy into his right hand desk drawer.

“Yes, Sir.”

He set to straightening his quill stand and ink pot.

Pansy turned, and walked to his door on unsteady legs.

She paused with her hand on the doorknob, and looked back at him. “Good evening, Mr. Secretary."

“Good evening, Miss Parkinson.”

His attention never wavered from his work.

At home that night, she slid out of the tight cream and polka dot dress before the long mirror in her bathroom while water ran steaming into her bathtub.

She pulled off her bra, then drew her red lace knickers down her legs, kicking them aside.

She peered over her shoulder at the reflection of her backside in the mirror.

There were two wide patches of deep, angry red on each cheek, and where she ran her fingers tentatively over them, her skin felt scalding and tender to the touch.

She removed her make-up, put up her hair, then sank into her bath. Her skin screamed and stung, then calmed, submitting to the tranquilizing heat of the water.

She breathed in a mouthful of scented steam, and closed her eyes.

Behind her eyelids, she watched a hand with a scattering of pale, rust-colored freckles set down a pair of folded glasses.

_Good girl._

Desire, hot and greedy and so intense it made her clamp her eyes shut in embarrassment, caught the tinder inside her, and burned.


	3. Chapter 3

Before he began, Percy leaned in close to her ear and spoke to her in a low, measured voice.

"You'll tell me if it’s not alright. If it needs to stop."

Pansy nodded.

“Use your words.”

“Yes, Sir.”

She waited for him to speak again.

"I hadn't . . .” He paused. “I didn’t ask if it was too hard. Before."

A wave of pleasure rolled up her spine.

Before, she'd worn the evidence of him on her skin for an entire day before it faded away, a secret she kept beneath the fabric of her dress.

"It wasn't too hard," she said.

He trailed his fingertips over the curve of her backside so lightly she barely felt it.

"Good."

He pushed away and stood behind her, and his voice resumed its usual clipped, authoritative tone.

"This time," he said, "you're going to count for me."

So it was that each Friday evening, as the office closed down, Pansy stepped into Percy’s office for her weekly performance review.

Try as she may to execute the duties of her position without error, she was invariably in need of disciplinary action.

" _One._ "

She clenched her jaw shut against a moan.

  
  


Late on a Saturday morning, two months into her career, Pansy leaned against the tufted velvet back of a salon chair, clutching a throw pillow that looked like it was made from the crimped and straggling hair of an exotic, blush pink sheep, as a witch worked her fingers up the length of Pansy’s calf muscles.

“Are you pregnant?”

Pansy grimaced, and sent Daphne a look of disgust from the corner of her eye.

“Gods, what on Earth would make you say something so macabre? You sound like my mother."

“Sorry.” Daphne’s head had lolled back pseudoorgasmically the moment her feet sank into the basin of hot water, and she hadn’t opened her eyes once in the last ten minutes. “It’s only that you’re positively serene, Pans. You've given up cigarettes, Tracey tells me you hardly go out anymore, and the only person I've heard you refer to as a 'fucking cunt' today was that wizard who made your chai latte this morning at the bakery and called you 'sweetheart'."

The cosmetologist doing Pansy's pedicure looked between the two of them and scowled.

"I thought perhaps there’d been a happy little accident,” Daphne concluded.

“No,” said Pansy, her voice laced with irritation. “There’d have to be someone sending their workers down the proverbial mine in order for there to be a disaster, wouldn’t there?"

Daphne briefly opened one eye.

“Merlin, Pans, how long has it been? You’re not one to let the grass grow under your velveteen channel.”

“My what?”

“Your vagina.”

Pansy studied her cuticles.

She hadn't taken a man to her bed for well over two months. “A while.”

“Well. This fellow must be something a bit different, then.” Daphne made an indecent noise as the cosmetologist massaging her pulled firmly at her big toe.

Pansy stiffened.

“There isn’t a fellow.”

“Pans?”

“Yes, Daphne.”

“How many years did we spend sleeping in the same room at Hogwarts?"

"Too many. You sound like a Hippogriff having a French wax when you snore."

"Gods, I need a wax."

"I've just had one."

"Where did you have it done? My last one was less than ideal. Blaise made fun of the uneven edges and I had to cut him off until it grew out."

"I go to Camille over at Salon Marceau. She's a genius."

"Perfect, I’ll have it scheduled. The point is that I'm keenly aware of your moods, Pans, and you've clearly either taken up a serious meditation practice, or there’s a fellow.” Daphne still hadn’t opened her eyes. “As I don’t see you sitting cross-legged on a cushion humming with your eyes closed unless it’s part of a sex thing, there’s someone. And you’ve gone apocalyptically soft over him, but you’re _not_ sleeping with him. That’s _very_ interesting.”

Pansy made a mental note to add time for making new and better friends to her calendar.

“Do we know him?” asked Daphne.

Pansy let the cosmetologist lift her foot out of the water, and begin pressing firm circles into her arch with her thumbs.

“Not socially.”

“Hmm. Good answer. Alright. I shan’t tell Blaise. He’ll only turn it into a whole thing." Daphne cocked one eye open toward Pansy again. “I’m thinking of going blonde today.”

“You are blonde.”

“Yes, but I could be blonder.”

Pansy didn’t argue.

“Daph?”

“Yes, Pans.”

“Have you ever had a man be—" Pansy considered her words "—hesitant to take things to the next level? Sexually. I mean, one that wasn’t in retrospect homosexual.”

“Hmm. I can’t say that I have, but you know that I’ve mostly been with Blaise, and he’s always trying to take things to levels he’s not prepared to handle. Anyway, I’m a monogamist, Pans. I've had a relationship with the same person on and off for nearly six years. I’m not sure I’m the right one to ask if it’s just about getting—” Daphne sat up and opened both of her eyes “—sex.” She stared at Pansy. “Oh, Merlin, Pansy.”

Pansy trained her gaze on the perfectly straight part at the top of her cosmetologist’s head.

“And he won’t sleep with you?” Daphne asked.

Pansy gave her head a tiny shake. "He hasn't tried to, anyway. And I'm not exactly unavailable."

“Is he married?” Daphne asked carefully.

“No." Pansy felt her gut lurch at the idea. “He’s not.”

“Girlfriend?”

Pansy kept his calendar, and knew when he had evening engagements just after work. And they had, she thought, come to a tacit agreement: if they stayed—she certainly couldn't say _faithful_ , but some pale, partially formed ghost of that concept—he could ask her to be good, and she would be.

“I don’t believe so.”

“This may sound entirely obvious, but—” Daphne sighed in appreciation as her cosmetologist squeezed her heel “—have you asked him directly for what you want?”

“I’m not sure how to do that,” Pansy said. “I can’t say that I’ve ever had to get down on my knees and beg a man for his cock.”

Pansy’s cosmetologist pulled on her toes with more roughness than necessary and grimaced at them both.

Daphne ran her fingers up into her thick blonde hair and shook it out over her shoulders, skin golden bronze from a weekend on her parents' yacht in Capri.

“I don’t know, Pans. That sounds like something most men would like.”

Pansy was creative and adventurous in bed, and thought she knew her way around the average shape of a man’s libido, but despite its clarity and simplicity, the idea felt like a holy revelation.

She'd simply never had to consider it before.

“I’m not sure that’s something that he’d . . . want.”

That he’d _allow,_ she added silently.

“If he wants you at all, he’ll want that. Say ‘Please,’ very pathetically.” Daphne looked up in thought. “Say it as though you’re a young widow, weakened by hunger, who’s trudged through the wind and snow for miles, and at last you’ve come to his lit window in the night, in desperate need of shelter and cock.”

Pansy looked stolidly at Daphne. “You've been reading that romance novel about the Russian Count and the young seamstress he accidentally impregnates again.”

“I have. It's completely perfect. When Natalyushka finds her Petya starving on the streets of Moscow, and he doesn't even know about little Alyosha—never mind, we're discussing your fellow." Daphne dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. “While you’re pleading with him, give him your biggest eyes, shove your swollen, milk-white orbs at him—" she fluttered her hazel eyes open like a baby deer and heaved her breasts forward “—and if he can refuse to send his rigid manhood bravely forth into your cave of womanly delights after that, he’s pointless and tiresome. You're well aware that Tracey and I can't possibly allow you to pine over pointless, tiresome men."

Pansy sighed. “Is this sort of nonsense what keeps Blaise coming back?" She waved the thought away. "Please don’t answer that.”

“What keeps Blaise coming back is that I never let on that I care whether he comes back or not."

“Touché.”

"Are you still growing your hair out?"

"Yes." Pansy turned away. "But I'm keeping the fringe."

Pansy’s quills were as sharp as they were ever going to be, but she sharpened each of them again.

It was 5 o’clock on the nose on Friday, and she hadn’t received one of the little white slips of parchment he’d sent her at the end of each of the last four weeks. The writing was always meticulous, but the wording was truncated and cursory, impatiently ungrammatical. 

_Office immediately, performance review._

She kept each of them in the upper right drawer of her desk.

Today, her desk was cleared, her quill container filled, her ink pot refreshed, and she had a tall, neat stack of snow white parchment squares ready for Monday morning.

The clock on the wall opposite ticked over to 5:03 p.m.

She supposed she ought to go home, but she couldn’t prevent herself from rising from her desk and knocking gently at his office door.

His voice was businesslike.

“Come in.”

Outside his office window, the trees looked muted and silver, and Pansy realized that wherever it was, it was steadily raining. She watched as a small squirrel with a grey back and reddish orange belly rushed up the trunk of a pine tree, made a short hop onto a neighboring branch, then leaped away out of sight, leaving the feathered green bough recoiling in its wake.

Percy’s desk was still covered in parchment, and he was uncharacteristically without his suit jacket, stripped down to his waistcoat and shirt, midnight blue with white. His sleeves were rolled, his tie wasn't completely tightened, and his jacket hung over the back of his chair.

Pansy only saw him briefly like that each week, and only when he was preparing to bend her over his desk.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Secretary,” she said. “I was wondering if you’ve finished with me for the week.”

He moved his hand with a final jot over the end of a signature, and looked up at her as though he was coming up for air from the depths of a thought.

“I’m sorry, Miss Parkinson, what was it that you needed?”

Pansy’s cheeks flushed.

“It’s after 5 o’clock, Sir." She waited for a beat. “It’s Friday. Shall I go home?”

He rotated his wrist and looked at his watch.

“Gods, it is, isn’t it?”

Pansy watched with fascination as color rose to his cheeks. She hadn’t seen him blush beyond the splotchy pink that often appeared at his neck when he disciplined her, or when she wore certain outfits, or when she complied for him swiftly and politely, especially in front of other people.

“Please accept my apologies, Miss Parkinson, but as you’re well aware, the inquiry into potential _ultra vires_ expenditures by the previous head of the department has grown in complexity and scope. I’ll be in my office after hours this evening looking over the compiled records." He considered her. “You’ve done very well this week. In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to say that your work has been exemplary.”

Pansy thrilled.

“Shall I send notes on attire via owl?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Very well. Then I’ll see you back in the office on Monday." He turned his attention back to the pages in front of him.

Pansy started towards the door, then on impulse, came to a halt. She turned back, and quickly crossed the room, coming to stand at the left side of Percy’s desk.

His brow furrowed, and after he'd read through one long parchment and flipped it onto one of the piles to his right, he looked up at her.

“Can I be of assistance, Miss Parkinson?”

She drew in a breath.

“I thought I might stay, Mr. Secretary,” she said. “To see if there was anything you wanted. That I could do for you."

He read her face, and as hard as she tried to write the prose of her want across it with purpose and clarity, he failed to understand.

“Your work day ends at 5 p.m., Miss Parkinson. I can’t legally require you to stay beyond your contracted hours. I believe the union would object, and without prior approval from payroll . . ."

Pansy pressed her eyes shut for a moment, and then reached out swiftly and slid her fingers over his left arm.

He twitched slightly at the touch, but didn't pull away.

Pansy wrapped her fingers around his wrist, lifted his arm, and before he could react, she turned her body and sat down sideways in his lap.

She placed his arm back down on the desk right where she'd picked it up, then shifted down to fit into his frame, tucking up her knees, and relaxing the side of her arm against his chest. She dropped the edge of her jaw against the top of his shoulder and sighed.

He sat still and tense underneath her, not moving at all. She was afraid that he was going to object, even to push her away, but then slowly, he began shifting papers across the surface of his desk just as he had been before she had folded herself into him. 

She brought her mouth close to his ear. “Can I do anything to help you, Mr. Secretary?”

The left corner of his mouth twitched.

He wrote his immaculate signature across the bottom of a page, then held the paper up close to her.

“Blow.”

She blew a stream of air across the surface of the ink, then he laid the page in a pile to his left.

By increments, he continued to relax underneath her, and after a while she felt lulled by the way the subtle motions of his arms and shoulders jostled her, and the way that his chest rose and fell against her ribs.

She’d never touched him, not really, and as her confidence in the sense that he wasn’t going to ask her to move grew, she was flooded with a greedy, anxious curiosity.

She brought her right hand to the crook of his left arm, tucked one finger into the rolled cuff of his shirt, and slid it down into the bend in his elbow. She stroked the soft, heated skin that she found there, while he lifted a document and ran his eyes over it with quick movements.

She wrote tiny, inscrutable letters against his skin.

P . . . A . . . N . . . S . . . Y

She sighed in satisfaction. 

After a while, she drew her fingers away from his arm, and brought them to the top button on his vest, scrolling her index finger around its hard wooden edge. Carefully, she began to slip it through the buttonhole.

“No." He shifted the document into his left hand, and brought his right hand down firmly against her backside.

She dropped her fingers away from his button, and breathed out her annoyance, twisting her head to look back out the window. The steady rain dripped against the pine boughs, which swayed and dipped in a complex chorus of random, shivering movements. The light was grey and dim.

“Where is it?” she asked. She dipped her right index finger experimentally into the depression at the base of his throat.

He picked up his wand, and sent a rolled stack of documents off through his transom window under a paper parachute he’d conjured with a swift flick of his wrist, then sent a second pile to the filing shelves behind him.

“Where is what?” he asked.

“The window.”

She felt him take in a deep breath, and push it back out again. The rush of air stirred the fine hairs on her forearm, and she shivered.

“Stop moving, Miss Parkinson." He picked up his quill to take notes in the margin of a paper. “You’ll jostle my quill and then I’ll have to do this over.”

“Then you’d need to stay even later,” she said, moving the pad of her finger over the base of his throat in lazy circles.

“I would. And I wouldn’t be happy about it.”

She held as still as she could.

“It’s a place where I went to get away once." He leaned forward to dip his quill into his ink pot. “A quarter of the way around the world.”

She kept her chin pressed to his shoulder, and watched the rain.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It is.”

She looked back at him, and began to outline the shapes of constellations between the sparse freckles just behind his ear.

“Did you get away _with_ someone?” she asked. The naked insecurity in the question made her stomach turn.

Another stack of papers was disassembled and spread out across his desk.

“I went there to walk in the mountains," he said. “For a summer. Alone.”

“Mmm.” On the surface of his skin, invented from the lines she sketched between each rust-colored dot, she found the loose shape of a trapezoid. Four triangles. A star.

“I was advised that time spent in nature could help with grief.” He sounded at ease when he said it.

She dropped her hand into her lap.

“Did it?”

He brought his left arm over the curve of her thigh, and rested his hand against her backside.

“Yes. I believe it did."

She watched as he used a wandless sticking charm in lieu of his left hand to keep his parchment from shifting on his desk, and wrote out a lengthy memo to the Minister.

“I misspelled the word ‘accommodate’ in a memo that went out with your signature on it this afternoon, Mr. Secretary,” she said, pulling absently at the knot of his tie.

His quill stilled. “Then I’ll ask you to run the spelling correction charm on your work in every instance, Miss Parkinson.”

“I did it on purpose, Sir,” she said, dropping her voice low. “I was hoping that you’d notice.”

“I’ve been unusually bogged down in paperwork, which you well know.” He frowned. “That was extraordinarily naughty of you.”

“It wasn’t the only naughty thing that I did, Mr. Secretary.”

“No? You’ll need to tell me what else you’ve been up to, then.”

“I hung your dress robes in the opposite order to the way that you like them.”

He turned to her, and gave her a look of complete shock.

“You did not, Miss Parkinson.”

“I did.”

“This is very serious,” he said, resuming his paper shuffling and thinning the stacks.

“That isn’t all, Sir."

“Miss Parkinson.” His face became stern. “I rescind my earlier compliment to your work.”

“Do you want to know what I did?”

“I believe you’d better tell me, so that I can implement a plan to improve your behavior.”

She whispered, then, with her mouth nearly against his ear.

“I made myself come three times last night, thinking about you.”

Every fiber of his body stilled.

She dropped her head back down to his shoulder, and began tugging in earnest at the knot in his tie.

“I said no, Miss Parkinson." He grabbed her hand and put it in her lap, then brought his hand down against her arse again with an audible impact.

His breathing deepened. She could feel it. She pressed her hand over his chest, and felt his heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt.

He resumed his work with the papers, and she tried to suppress a smile when she realized that his pace had picked up substantially, and he was sending them flying away from his desk faster than she’d ever seen him do it before.

Finally, the surface in front of him was clear and open.

He pushed his chair back from the edge of his desk, and grabbed her hips.

“You're going to bend over my desk, Miss Parkinson,” he said matter-of-factly.

She stood as he pushed her off his lap, and looked down to meet his eyes for a moment before bending to put her elbows and palms flat on his desk.

“Shall I count for you, Sir?”

“You’ll do as I tell you, when I tell you to do it.”

Pansy blinked, and breathed deeply to calm herself.

“Pull up your skirt, Miss Parkinson.”

Pansy didn’t move.

“Do I need to tell you twice?”

She reached down to grasp the hem of her skirt.

She pulled it up slowly, until it sat on her hips.

“Higher,” he demanded.

She hiked it over her hips to settle around her waist.

She turned to look back at him over her shoulder.

“Eyes forward,” he said.

She trained her eyes on the door to his office, where the lock clicked into place.

He’d asked her to wear white knickers, and she had complied with a pair of white silk satin tap pants edged in white lace, pulled over the top of the matching suspender belt that held up her stockings.

She waited for him to tell her what to do next.

After a long pause, he spoke again. He hadn't moved from where he sat.

“Take your knickers down to your knees.”

Her pulse bolted.

Finally.

Now.

_Please._

She tucked her thumbs under the waistband of her knickers, and slowly drew them down. When she had pulled them far enough that she was nearly revealed to him, she paused, her belly burning with a sudden, unexpected self-consciousness.

“You needn't worry, Miss Parkinson." His voice had grown gravelly. “I’m not going to fuck you.”

She began to turn back to look at him again.

“Will you be able to look forward, or do I need to hold your head still for you?”

“I’ll do as I’m told, Sir,” she said.

“Get your knickers down.”

The silk slid coolly over the skin of her thighs as she pushed her knickers to her knees.

She could feel air against her bared flesh.

The tops of her thighs, in the space before they met her stockings.

Her arse.

Her cunt.

She was wet.

She had felt it building while she sat in his lap, heated in embarrassment at the way her skin slid against the fabric of her knickers while she’d confessed to making herself come to the thought of him, and had prayed that it didn’t show through the silk as she pulled up her skirt.

She felt cold where the lubricated damp of her skin met the air.

“You’re wet, Miss Parkinson.”

His voice was expressionless.

She nodded.

“Why are you wet?”

“Because of you, Sir.”

She could hear his breathing.

"Do you frequently come into my office like this?"

"Yes, Sir."

“Get yourself off.”

She heard him, but couldn’t make sense of what he’d said.

“What?”

"I said, get yourself off. You said you touched yourself last night. Show me.”

“I thought you were going to—”

“You know how I feel about repeating myself. I’m not going to fuck you. You’re going to get your hand between your legs, and make yourself come like you did last night.”

Hesitating, Pansy ran the unsteady fingers of her right hand down the surface of the desk. When they reached the edge, she shifted her weight to her left arm, lifted her hand, and slid it between her legs.

She ran a single finger tentatively against the palpably wet, soft skin she found there, then added another, slipping two fingers against the seam of her cunt. Her face bloomed with twin patches of bright, hot shame as she heard the unmistakable sound of herself opening to her own fingers.

She shuddered as she moved over the hard swell of her clitoris, making an exploratory swirl around it.

“Good girl,” he said.

She tried to stop it, but couldn’t.

Her mouth dropped open of its own will, and she moaned.

As if given permission they weren’t certain they had before, her fingers suddenly sped against her clit, moving with the precisely calibrated pressure and geometry that had brought her faithfully to orgasm within short minutes since she was a girl at school.

“Slow down, Miss Parkinson,” he ordered.

_No._

She needed to come, to finish for him, so she could pull up her knickers and pull down her skirt and hide the shame burning at her throat, her jaw, her cheeks, across the back of her neck.

He stood, and without warning, brought the open palm of his hand down against the right side of her arse, hard.

She cried out, but was unable to hide the edge of arousal in her voice that she’d made every effort to shield from him each time he’d spanked her.

She wanted the heat of his hand against her.

Again.

_Again._

_Please_.

“I said, slow down,” he repeated.

He leaned over her, brought his hand around her hip, and grabbed her wrist, pulling her hand away from her cunt.

“You enjoy it when I spank you."

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“If I keep doing it, you’re going to come.”

“Yes.” She tested the strength of his grip, but he held her wrist hard, and wasn’t going to let go.

“I’m going to let go of your wrist, and then I’m going to allow you to use one finger to touch yourself. Just one. Am I understood?”

She wanted to shake her head no.

“ _Am I understood?_ ” he repeated.

“Yes, Sir.”

“And you are not getting a single slap on your arse again until you’ve made yourself come, slowly, with that one finger. Nod your head if you understand.”

She nodded.

“If you go too fast, I’m going to take your hand away again, and I’m not going to let you come tonight. You’re going to go home with an aching cunt, and without me laying a hand on you. And you will not be allowed to come again until you have my express permission. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Alright. Start again.”

Pansy almost sobbed as he let go of her wrist.

He continued to stand over her while she brought a single finger to her clit, now fully peaked with arousal, and swirled the pad of her finger through the slick moisture around it.

It wasn’t going to be enough.

She rocked her hips forward against her hand. Pressed first hard, and then soft, against the head of her clitoris. Sped up the circles she made around it, looking for some kind of increased sensation, but what felt best was a feather light, teasing loop that seemed to wind her up and then drop her, over and over again.

“Tell me what you think about when you make yourself come, Miss Parkinson.”

_Swirl, softly, around the knot of want between your legs._

“I think about you bending me over your desk.”

“Alright. What else.”

“I think about your cock.”

"'Cock' is a crass word. Ask me for permission to use it."

"May I say 'cock', Sir?"

"Say 'please'."

"Please."

"You may. Tell me what else you think about."

_Around, lightly. Wind up, but don’t fall._

She thought of a sound she’d imagined a hundred times, and for a moment wondered if she actually heard it in the room.

“Be more specific, Miss Parkinson.”

“I think about the sound of your belt buckle coming undone.”

“And why am I opening my belt?”

“Because you’re going to fuck me.”

“You don't have my permission to say ‘fuck’ in this office.”

“May I please say ‘fuck’, Sir?” Her breath was racing away from her. She couldn’t catch it. She couldn't keep up.

“You may.”

A pulse of wet from her cunt. It would slide, soon, right down her thigh, where he could see it. 

“Why would I fuck you, Miss Parkinson?”

“Because I want it.”

“Do you always get what you want?”

“No. Not from you.”

“Good girl.”

 _Wind up. Moan. Let him hear. He can hear._

"After the belt, what?”

“I can’t see you. But I know that you take out your cock.”

“What am I going to do with my cock, Miss Parkinson?”

“You’re going to fuck me.”

“Fuck your what?”

She panted hard.

"May I please say 'cunt', Sir?"

"Yes."

“You're going to fuck my cunt.”

“This cunt, Miss Parkinson?” he said quietly.

He brought his hand around her hip again, and laid his fingers gently over the back of her hand as it worked against her clit.

“Yes.”

“And why would I take out my cock, and fuck this cunt, when you’re getting yourself off so well without it?”

He mouth fell open, and she couldn't stop the small moan of frustration that followed.

_Lift. Lift. Don’t fall._

“I can’t.”

“You can’t what?”

“I can’t make myself come.”

“What do you need?” He was solicitous. He would help her.

“I need your cock.”

“That’s unfortunate, Miss Parkinson, because I’m not going to give it to you.”

_Around, again. Again. Again._

“Please.” She sounded desperate. She was desperate.

_Please. Please. Please._

“You’re going to do as you've been told, and you’re going to make yourself come like this. And after you do, you’re going to go home and make yourself come again, however you'd like.”

“Yes, Sir.” She couldn’t breathe.

“Think about my cock. Think about me fucking you. Just like this. Fom behind. Over my desk.”

She moaned, eyes open to the closed door of his office.

“Do I fuck you hard, Miss Parkinson?”

“Yes.”

“Do I care whether or not you come?”

She bit her lip, hard.

“Answer the question,” he said.

“No. You don’t care.”

_Up. Up. Not falling._

_Fuck._

“I fuck this sweet, wet little cunt however I want, don’t I?"

“Yes.”

_Fuck._

“But you come anyway.”

_Fuck._

_Fuck._

_Fuck._

“ _Yes_.”

“Fucking come, Pansy. Be my good girl, and fucking come for me.”

She came.

The sensation ripped through her with exquisite violence, and pulled from her throat a jagged, animal sound that communicated something about the way that pleasure can sometimes feel barely separated from pain. That there can be, sometimes, no separation at all.

As the forward edge of the sound took shape in her throat, he grabbed her left hip in his hand and jerked her back against him, and she felt the clothed outline of his hard cock slam against her arse as she trembled through her climax.

She reached back blindly, found his free hand, and brought it to her right breast. He grasped her through the thin fabric of her blouse.

"I want your cock,” she breathed. “Inside me. Anywhere. Please. _Please._ Let me make you come.”

He bent his mouth to her ear and spoke softly. “I said no. If you ask me one more time, I won’t let you come for a week.”

She arched her back, pressing her arse against his cock, but instead of answering with his own pressure, he waited until the aftershocks had stopped pulsing through her body, and pulled away. He let go of her breast, and in a moment, she heard the little groan of his desk chair as he sat down.

“You may pull up your knickers, Miss Parkinson, and fix your skirt.”

She stood in shock, then bent awkwardly to gather her knickers with shaking fingers from where they’d fallen to her ankles, and drew them up over her hips. Then she rotated her skirt back into place, and slid it down.

His hand at her breast had pulled her shirt free from the waist of her skirt, and she quickly tucked it back in, and lifted a hand to smooth her hair.

She looked over her shoulder at him.

He was sitting in his desk chair, leaning casually back, but he looked, in that moment, like someone she had never seen before.

It wasn’t that he was disheveled, though the lines of him that were always so perfectly sharp had blurred. His loosened tie hung slightly askew, and his clothes were subtly wrinkled. What struck Pansy was the wild flush of pink at his throat and cheeks, and the way he was looking at her through his spectacles. Her body tightened in anticipation as though it hadn’t just been brought to complete ruin moments ago.

He wanted to fucking devour her.

But he wasn’t going to.

She wanted to get down on her knees and whine. Run her mouth up the inside of his thigh. Press open mouthed kisses over his clothed cock, which she knew was impossibly hard.

She _wanted._

He wanted to make her wait.

“Can I do anything further for you before I leave, Sir?”

His eyes flashed.

“That will be all for tonight, Miss Parkinson.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

She walked as quickly as she could from his desk, and as she gathered her things, she only spared half a glance to his open office door.

He sat at his desk, leaning in his chair. His head had dropped back, and his eyes were closed. If she had given him another moment’s consideration, she might have thought that the way he slipped his fingers beneath the bridge of his glasses to slowly rub his eyes looked like something more than the commonplace gesture of a tired man finishing up a long day of work.

There was an owl waiting for her when she got home.

_Monday: Red dress. No knickers. Tonight, come one more time, as fast as you like._

She leaned back against her front door, slipped her hand up under her skirt, and came in under a minute with the parchment crushed in her fist.

He said and did nothing all week to indicate that anything different had happened between them.

She continued to wear what he liked, even complied with his demand that she go without knickers first on Monday and then again on Wednesday, but he seemed, if anything, more remote than ever.

On Friday, knotted up with frustration, she leaned over more than she needed to as she picked up a bound dossier from his desk to hand-deliver it to Simmons. She arched her back and gave Percy a wide open view down the neckline of her button up blouse to the perilously low cups of her white lace bra.

“Is there anything more that I can do for you, Mr. Secretary?” she asked.

“That will be all, Miss Parkinson,” he said, without looking up.

On her way out the door, he stopped her.

“Actually, Miss Parkinson,” he began.

Her heart bounded.

“Please forgo the chocolate biscuit with my lunch on Monday. I’m avoiding excess sugars at present.”

She stared at him.

“Anything else, Sir?”

“No. Thank you.”

She walked out of his office and closed the door a little too hard.

She hadn’t made herself come once since he'd given her permission to for a second time on Friday night.

That was a week ago.

She was wound up and frustrated, hungry for something she couldn’t fully identify, so couldn’t hunt down for herself and consume. It wasn’t a mere orgasm that she wanted, or even the uncomplicated physicality of a satisfying fuck, but something that was simultaneously both of those things and neither of them. 

She felt like a fool.

Returning from Simmons’ desk, she threw herself into her chair and began to make short work of Percy’s incoming papers.

“Hello, Miss Parkinson.”

Jonathan Gable approached her desk, looking smart in a charcoal gray suit and black tie.

“Hello, Jonathan," said Pansy. "Secretary Weasley is just finishing up with the Director of Policy. He’ll be available for your meeting shortly.”

Jonathan smiled at her.

“Thanks, Pansy. You’re looking very well lately.” He backpedaled. “Not that you weren’t before. There's just a little extra something about you these days.”

She gave him a shrug in thanks.

“I appreciate the sentiment, Jonathan. As much as I’d prefer to die than admit it to my mother, I think having a job rather suits me.”

“That’s wonderful. And a testament to your abilities, given the turnover of secretaries under Weasley.”

She looked at him in confusion.

“Well, not to speak ill of a colleague- Weasley’s certainly a consummate professional- but he’s a bit rough to work directly under, as I understand it. I was able to poach Mr. Drees from him after I caught him having a nice hard cry in the gent’s on Level 4 after Percy made an issue of Drees’ way of rolling parchment top to bottom instead of bottom to top. Higher standards than strictly necessary. But you seem to have cracked the code.”

The door to Percy’s office opened, and the Director of Policy for the Minister’s office sailed out the door, a small, stern-faced witch in her 50s who wore her hair in a short, iron-grey bob and trailed a heavy musk-based perfume behind her throughout the Ministry.

“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Gable,” said Pansy.

She stepped into Percy’s office, and knocked lightly on his open door.

“Mr. Secretary, Mr. Gable is here for your 3 o’clock.”

Percy was rifling through his file shelves with his wand drawn, filing new rolls of parchment.

“Thank you, Miss Parkinson, send him in.”

As Jonathan headed into Percy’s office, he paused by her desk.

“We never did make it to the cinema, did we.” She’d studiously avoided him for over a month after they’d kissed, and he’d not troubled her about it. His voice was carefully casual.

“We didn’t. More’s the pity.”

“Are you seeing anyone at the moment?” he asked, in that same light tone.

Pansy froze.

Her back was to Percy’s open door.

Her mouth opened, then closed again.

Was she seeing anyone?

She wasn’t going out on dates, in public, with anyone.

She also wasn’t taking anyone home to her bed.

What she was doing was bending over her boss’s desk, getting her arse smacked, and now showing him her cunt and jerking off for him whenever he had the inclination to see it. Between times, it appeared that she was now going to be studiously ignored.

She made the split second decision to tell Jonathan Gable the truth.

“No, I’m not seeing anyone,” she answered.

“Oh. Well, perhaps we can have a drink again sometime.”

She nodded. “Perhaps.”

“You’ll let me know?”

Pansy nodded.

Jonathan smiled broadly at her, and walked into Percy’s office. 

As Pansy went to pull Percy’s door shut, Percy waved her in.

“Miss Parkinson, don’t leave just yet. Would you like a cup of tea, Gable?”

“Oh, thanks, that sounds lovely.” Jonathan tipped his head gratefully at Pansy.

“Miss Parkinson, fetch tea for me, and for Mr. Gable. Gable, tell Miss Parkinson how you take yours.”

“Two sugars and a twist of lemon,” said Pansy, giving Jonathan a wink. “I know that one.”

She headed across the office to the kitchenette, and returned shortly, holding onto the edges of two saucers.

She set down first Jonathan’s and then Percy’s cups, and headed out the door.

They sat in their meeting for 45 minutes, until Jonathan and his ready smile breezed their way past her desk and back to Level 4 with further promises to connect over a glass at the pub.

She received a small, white bird on her desk the moment Jonathan had stepped foot outside the mahogany door of the Ministry of Justice.

_My office immediately._

She knocked, and entered.

He was at his desk as usual, and didn’t look up.

She waited until he finally spoke.  
“Close the door.”

She turned and pushed the door to. 

“Miss Parkinson, Mr. Gable is in need of our meeting notes from March the 15th, as well as March the 22nd, pertaining to the inquiry into vampire sentencing. Please find them, make fresh copies, then run them down to him on Level 4. It’s a sensitive topic and I don’t want them getting lost in Ministry airspace.”

“Of course, Sir,” said Pansy.

She crossed behind his desk to his filing shelves, and began her search for the relevant documents.

She was halfway through the second week of March when he stood, then tossed his folded jacket over the back of his chair. With a casual, patient air, hands pushed into his pockets, he walked over to where she was working.

She ignored him as he moved to stand directly behind her, and kept doing so even as his arms slid under hers. She found the notes for March 15th as his hand placed his folded glasses on a shelf to her left, and had begun to dig through the third week of March when his fingers began slowly undoing the top button of her blouse.

She kept working, disregarding the rising heat between her legs, and the way her abdomen clenched at the smooth, unhurried certainty of his fingers.

Finally, around March 21st, she couldn’t take it anymore.

“What are you doing, Mr. Secretary?”

“Nothing.”

His fingers slid with exaggerated languor down the edge of the placket of her shirt to find the second button, and begin pulling it open.

“It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like you’re undoing my blouse at”- she turned her head to look at the clock on his wall- “4 o’clock in the afternoon, with the rest of the staff sitting right outside your door.”  
“That couldn’t possibly be.”

“No, it couldn’t.”

He drew his fingers down to undo the third button.

“I was grateful to hear that you’re not seeing anyone, Miss Parkinson,” he said.

Her belly turned.

“I...” She stalled, unsure of what to say. “Why would that make you grateful?”

“Because”- he leaned over her shoulder and watched her blouse come undone- “I won’t need to feel that I’m being improper if I’m treated to a hint of your nipples in a very impractical bit of lingerie every time I need my secretary to retrieve something from my desk.”

She blushed.

“I’m shocked that you noticed," she said.

He actually laughed.

“Miss Parkinson,” he said, slipping open the fourth button, just below her breasts, “if I responded every time I saw one of your barely concealed breasts"- he unclasped the fifth button- “or a flash of suspender against a thigh”- he untucked her blouse from her skirt- “or evidence that you’ve done as you’ve been told, and aren’t wearing any knickers” -the last two buttons on her blouse came undone, and he pushed it open to either side of her breasts- “I would never get a moment of work done in this office. Shall I touch your breasts? That is if you haven’t anyone in your life who will object, besides yourself, of course.”

“Yes.”

He ran both hands over her breasts in a cursory manner, feeling her hardened nipples under his palms. Then he pushed his left hand unceremoniously underneath the bottom edge of her bra on the right side, pulled firmly at her flesh, then drew her nipple between his thumb and index finger and pressed it hard.

Despite every intention not to, she groaned.

“I’ve neither locked my office door, nor silenced the room, Miss Parkinson, so you’d do well to be quick, and quiet.”

“Quick?” she breathed.

“At getting yourself off. I’m pulling up your skirt now.”

He kept his left hand at her breast, and with the right, he pulled up her skirt until it was around her waist.

She was wearing a pair of minuscule white lace knickers, embroidered with pastel ribbons in the likeness of spring flowers, to match the frail, purely ornamental little bra that was so inadequate to its duties.

“Beautiful.” His voice sounded distant and distracted, and he ran his fingers briefly over her arse. “I’m going to pull them down. Tell me that I can.”

“You can.”

He pinched hard at her nipple at the same time that he yanked her knickers down first on one side, then the other, until they were around her thighs.

She felt a swell of want, and the unmistakable slip of wetness between her legs.

“If you were seeing someone...” Percy began, taking her right hand in his, and guiding it between her legs.

“I’m not seeing anyone,” she interjected.

“Of course. Touch yourself.”

She slid her fingers through the arousal that had already accumulated there.

“May I use both fingers, Sir?”

“Yes.”

He shifted behind her, and she heard the sound of metal against metal as he undid his belt buckle.

A shudder rocked her frame.

If a smile made a sound, she’d have heard his.

He knew.

“I'm not going to fuck you," he reminded her.

 _Why_.

"If you were seeing someone," he repeated, "it would make this very complicated."

She gasped as her fingers found the hard rise of her clitoris and began their work in earnest. There was another shift behind her, and the sound of a zip.

His hand moved hastily, greedily, to push beneath her bra on the left side, and he gripped her firmly there, too, then pulled and pressed at her nipple.

“And this isn't complicated at all, is it, Miss Parkinson.”

She said nothing.

“Simple, straightforward.”

 _No_.

As her hand moved faster against herself, she heard the sound of his breathing picking up. He had pulled out his cock, and was stroking it with impatient purpose. The hand at her breast shifted into an equally bruising, but less focused touch.

"No flowers," he said.

"I don't need flowers.” She panted under the pressure building beneath her fingers.

“No worries about meeting anyone's mother.”

"My mother is awful."

She was running out of breath.

"Something fun," he said. "If maybe a little dark. Until you meet someone nice."

"I don't want to meet someone nice."

She could hear his hand slide in a building rhythm over his cock.

“Tell me what you do want,” he said.

“I want you.”

“Be specific.”

“I want you to fuck me.”

“Say please.” His breath was becoming increasingly ragged.

“Please.”

“What else?”

“I want you to kiss me.”

“‘I want you to kiss me, _please.’_ ”

“Please. _Please._ ”

“What else.” His hand began to tighten against her breast almost painfully.

“I want you to want me.”

There was hurt in her voice. There was need.

_Fuck._

“I want you,” he groaned.

"What else do you want?" she asked. Her fingers kept up their steady work, and her cunt clenched down hard around nothing. She grabbed at his arm with her free hand as her legs started to shake.

He leaned down, and his mouth found her ear, pulling roughly at the flesh of her lobe. He sucked, and licked, then bit down softly before whispering at the entrance to her ear.

"I want to stop getting hard in the fucking lifts every morning because some witch uses the same shampoo as you."

Pansy moaned. “I’m going to come.”

“ _Yes._ ”

Her voice rose from a breath into a groan in the unsilenced room, and his hand withdrew from her breast and clamped over her mouth.

“Shh. Shh. _Fuck._ ” 

As she shuddered under the practiced tension of her own fingers, his forehead dropped forward against her shoulder, and she heard him grunt quietly as he strained against her back.

There was the unmistakable slight, wet trickle of his come against her arse, and when she’d stopped moaning outright, his hand slid back down to clutch idly at her breast.

For a full minute, they leaned against one another and breathed, each giving in to sporadic shivers.

He spoke first, mouth against her ear. 

“The first time I kiss you, and the first time I fuck you, will not be over a desk in this fucking office.”

Pansy’s legs shook, and she gripped the edge of the file shelf to stay on her feet.

He pulled away, retrieving his glasses from in front of her, and she heard the sound of him adjusting himself and zipping his trousers before his belt buckle clinked again.

“Pull up your knickers,” he said.

“Shouldn’t I…”

“Just pull them up.”

She looked at him questioningly over her shoulder as she pulled her bra back down over her breasts, but did as she was told.

“Pull down your skirt, fix your shirt, then take those notes down to Gable.”

She stared at him.

“You’re sending me down to Jonathan Gable.”

He said nothing.

“Right now,” she confirmed.

The patch of sticky wetness spread against the skin of her backside, hidden underneath her skirt.

His face was impassive.

“I’d like another tea when you get back.”

The following Monday morning, Pansy was in the office ten minutes before 8 o’clock, fixing tea in the kitchenette.

“Alright, Pansy?”

“Hello, Kath,” Pansy replied. “How was your weekend?”

“Grand, thanks for asking, love. Our Hugo had his surgery the week previous, as you know, but he’s back on his feet and spitting vinegar, gods love him.”

“How many cats is it you have, Kath?”

Pansy sipped her tea, placed it in her saucer, and picked it up along with the second cup she’d made: one sugar, generous splash of milk, piping hot.

“Well, with Hugo and the two little girls,” said Kath, counting on her fingers, “that’ll be our Gretl and Delilah, plus poor old Richard, and Maxime- that’s the fellow with the lazy eye- that’s five. I’ve had my eye on a litter of grey tabbies, but my flatmate says no.”

“You’ve got to stand up for what you want in this life, Kath.”

“Too true, love. Those are the most elegant flowers you’ve got on your desk this morning, aren’t they. I can’t say as I’ve ever seen a more beautiful arrangement, that’s no exaggeration.”

“They’re very beautiful.”

“Are they from your beau, then?”

Pansy turned her face away from Kath.

“No.” She pushed the door open with her hip, and bit back a smile as she answered over her shoulder. “I’m not seeing anyone.”


	4. Chapter 4

“All I’m asking is, why don’t I get invited to brunch?”

“You don’t get invited to brunch because Blaise is a howling toddler,” said Pansy. “What do you think of these?” She held up a package of silver glitter balloons.

Theo looked at her forlornly.

“No? Not a balloon occasion.” She tossed them back on the shelf.

“I shouldn’t think so, but you’re the captain of the Party Committee.” Theo settled into his sulk and made himself comfortably at home there, pulling an aniseed twist from the white paper bag Pansy held out to him and popping it pettishly into his mouth. “But you lunch with Draco. I don’t see what the difference is.”

“I'm the Committee Chair, Theodore, not its captain. Although now that you mention it, a little cap and some regimentals might help keep meetings on agenda. And how can you not see that lunch is entirely different to brunch? Honestly, you’re going to be the _worst_ chore for whoever finally snaps you up.”

“I'm sure I intend to be. What does the Party Committee do besides hosting dinners?” asked Theo.

“No, don’t touch those, we’re not buying them.” She slapped his hand away from a package of confetti poppers that claimed to smell of vanilla cake and play _Happy Birthday_ upon being detonated. “It’s not a dinner, it’s a recognition luncheon for years of Ministry service. Apparently it’s done in 5 year increments. Percy’s nearly at 10, but that won't be until next year.” She turned her face away from Theo quickly and bit the inside of her cheek as she picked up a beeswax pillar candle. “Candles?”

“Candles are a yes. Put them in those glass thingies.”

“Hurricanes?”

“Merlin, Pans, there’s no need to bring foul weather into it. There ought to be flowers as well, people always like those at a table.”

“We’ll go with votives. And of course there will be flowers." Pansy loaded several boxes of votive candles into the shopping trolley Theo was pushing. "I’m not an amateur.”

“So why is it that Draco gets to lunch, but I’m not allowed to brunch?”

“I've explained it to you already: I’ll lunch with you absolutely any time at all, you know that I will, but Blaise refuses to open up brunch. He's a brunch monogamist. I've tried, Theo. I promise. If he'd admit a third I'd have no qualms about taking you both at once."

“They haven’t waffles at lunch,” muttered Theo, sucking at the candy in his mouth.

“Hand me four of those packages of serviettes. No, the blue ones with the floral pattern. The gold ones are grotesque.”

Theo handed them to her.

“Have you had your suit fitting for the wedding yet?” she asked him.

“No, am I meant to have done?”

Pansy leveled a dour look at him.

“Alright, I’ll schedule it,” Theo pouted. “You’ll come to the shop with me, though?”

“If I do, there’ll be no more whinging about brunch.”

He frowned. "Fine. How is it that you’re a bridesmaid, anyway? I thought it was meant to be the bride’s close friends and relations.”

“Did you drop an entire case of chocolate frogs in here, Theo?” Pansy pulled out a suspicious box from the trolley. “I said no more candy, go and put it back.” She watched Theo walk off, and return empty handed. “Yes, normally it is the bride’s nearest and dearest, but this bride has a rather curious shortage of close female friends. Apparently the discussion was down to me, Luna Lovegood, or Potter in a dress, and I’m pleased to say that I was the clear winner there. Potter’s bust is all wrong for an A-line.”

“Well you are Draco’s best mate. Besides Blaise, I mean.”

“He’d do well to remember that while I’m standing up there wearing mauve.”

“It’s the Weaslette, isn’t it? The other bridesmaid?”

Pansy stiffened.

“Ginny, yes. You’ll mind the Weasel talk, Theo, we’re not in 3rd year anymore.”

“Sorry, I forgot you were toiling under one of them. Blaise says your Secretary Weasley was Head Boy our third year. Do you even recall that? I don’t recall that.”

Pansy had thought of Percy's stint as Head Boy several times in recent weeks, in ways that made her cheeks color.

“How could you have possibly missed an entire year of someone being Head Boy?” she asked.

Theo shrugged, and grabbed a lemon drop from the bag.

“I had a lot of reading to do. How’s it getting on, then? The paid servitude, I mean."

“It’s alright," she hedged. "Well enough to keep Mother and Father mollified, I suppose. The trust fund continues to flow."

“I ought to get a job.”

“Whatever for? You’ve got the charge of your estate. You’re perfectly free to lounge about your drafty little castle in your pants and read baking periodicals out loud to Paul.”

“That was just the once. I told you to owl before Flooing over, but you never listen to me. And anyway, Paul loves baking more than anything.”

“He's a cat, he loves no such thing. Allowing him in the kitchen is unsanitary, and even if it wasn't- and I mean this on a very personal level- Paul's an absolute git. You can tell him I said so."

“Indisputably, but he's extremely sanitary. He washes his hands constantly.”

“Gods, Theo. You're stunning. Never change. What is it you think you’d do for a job, then, if no one’s forcing you into it?”

“I could open up a restaurant.”

“Not a bake shop?”

“No, I bake for fun. Turning it into an enterprise would spoil it entirely.”

“Fair enough. What sort of cuisine would you serve at this restaurant of yours?”

“Brunch.”

Pansy grimaced.

“ _Fucking_ hell, Theo. Take it up with Blaise.”

“The candles are meant to go in their holders, six at each table, spaced evenly around the flower arrangements, and the whole thing in the center of the table.” Pansy watched as Kath followed her instructions. “Just like that. Lovely.”

Pansy stood at the front of the auditorium at the Atrium level, overseeing the placement and setting of twelve tables.

“How many chairs, Miss Parkinson?” asked a young witch from Games and Sports.

“Ten at each, thank you, Sally.” A memo flew through the open door and landed on the table closest to Pansy.

She unfolded it, and read it over.

_My office, if you’re able._

She winked it out of existence with her wand.

“I’m wanted back upstairs for a moment, can you carry on without me for a few minutes, Kath?”

“Of course, love, not a problem. Ten chairs, flowers, candles.”

“And don’t forget the flowers for the podium.”

Pansy rode the lift back up to Level 2, and made her way into the Ministry for Justice just after 10 o’clock.

“Good morning, Ines,” said Pansy, waving as she passed the front desk. “How’s he been for you?”

“Reasonably well behaved, although I don’t think he’s loved not having you available. That is an outstanding dress, Pansy. I don’t know where you get all your frocks, but you look like one of my roses, the dark red ones we have at the top of the garden. You belong in a bouquet. And you matched your lipstick, too.”

“Thank you, Ines. I try to please.”

“There was a file for Secretary Weasley delivered to the front desk, would you like to take it right now?”

“Of course.”

Pansy grabbed the stack of parchment, and navigated around the sea of desks to the kitchenette to fix Percy’s tea.

As she passed the front desk again with the cup and saucer in one hand and the file in the other, Ines held up a single sheet of parchment.

“This memo just came in for him as well, shall I redirect it myself, or would you like to come back for it in a moment?”

“No, give it here,” said Pansy.

Ines laughed as she held it up, and Pansy clamped it lightly between her front teeth.

“He doesn’t deserve you, love,” said Ines, and Pansy shrugged.

Balancing the cup carefully on its saucer, she made her way to Percy’s office, and pushed at the door handle with her elbow.

He was at his desk, turned toward the Floo for a call, and glanced up at her as she entered the room.

“No, I don’t believe that the numbers support that conclusion,” he said authoritatively. Pansy couldn't identify the figure in the fireplace, but judging by Percy’s tone of voice, it was probably staff for a member of the Wizengamot.

She moved around his desk on the opposite side to the fireplace, set his tea down next to him, and removed the memo from her teeth. It was non-urgent, so she quietly shuffled it towards the bottom of his incoming documents pile.

“I’m sorry, please repeat that,” she heard Percy say, and listened as his conversant in the fireplace repeated what he’d just said, slower and with some irritation. “Of course. I can have my secretary pull those records, and get them over to your office by end of day. I think once you have the relevant data, you’ll agree with our position on that decision.”

“Alright. Thanks, we’ll be in touch,” said the disembodied head and shoulders in the Floo.

The fire fell back to its low smolder as the call ended.

Pansy flipped through the parchments in her hand.

“The file from DMLE you asked for yesterday came in, would you like it shelved, or will you have time to look at it today?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Is something wrong?” she said, looking up.

He sat in his chair, turned toward her, with his chin resting on his hand.

“You said you were going to surprise me today,” he said.

She reined in a half smile.

“Well,” she said coyly, “are you surprised?” She twirled once around, and the skirt of her dress floated up in a wide circle around her thighs. It was garnet red, with flutter sleeves, a high neck in the front, and an open back, held together across the back of her shoulders with long, narrow ribbons tied in a bow.

She'd curled her hair into soft waves rolling to the tops of her shoulders.

He took a deep breath.

“I’m surprised." He dropped both hands to his knees. “Come here.”

“What shall I do with the file, Mr. Secretary?” she asked as she approached his chair.

He reached out and grabbed it from her hand, and tossed it down carelessly in the middle of his desk.

“I’ll deal with it.” He leaned forward, ducked his hands below the hem of her skirt, and wrapped his fingers around the backs of her thighs. “I believe I told you to _come here_.” He pulled her in so that she stood between his knees.

“I was worried you’d think it was too much,” she said as his hands roamed over the fabric of her stockings to find the exposed skin above. “I’m not sure whether you’ve noticed, but the back is quite open.”

“I’ve noticed.” He pressed his grip into her thighs, then he withdrew his hands and took the front of the hem of her dress between his fingers.

“I need to be back downstairs to finish setting up for the luncheon, Sir.”

“Mmm.” He slowly bunched up her hem, until he could see the white silk French knickers trimmed in handmade black lace that she was wearing. He hummed in approval. “Always so beautiful. You never overdo it.”

“I need to go back downstairs, Sir,” she repeated softly.

“In a moment. I need to see about something.”

He grabbed her hips, and shifted his leg so that as he pulled her down, she straddled his right thigh.

“Mr. Secretary, whatever you have in mind-”

His hands, up under her skirt, pulled at her hips, making her slide against him.

A jolt passed through her as the smooth silk satin of her knickers shifted against the hard surface of his quadricep.

“Oh,” she said. It was nothing more than a small, simple breath, in declaration of surprise.

They’d played this game for three weeks.

They didn’t kiss, and only he was allowed to touch, his hands groping at her breasts and backside, smoothing over her thighs, her belly, or her back. Occasionally, his cock pressed urgently through the fabric of his trousers at her arse or thigh.

He’d developed a hunger for watching her come.

Several times, in the middle of the day, he’d sat in his chair and made her sit on the surface of his desk, just to his left, and work her hand under her knickers while he wrote memos and sent them out as though she wasn’t there.

On a Wednesday afternoon, while the office was out at lunch, he pushed her back up against one of his bookshelves, held her right hand over her head and had her bring herself off with her left, while he rolled his clothed erection impatiently against her hip.

He rarely came with her.

Once, after hours, she’d stayed late and brought him a cup of tea. When he’d finished it, he called her back in, shoved his hands in his pockets, leaned against the fireplace, and told her to lay with her back flat on his empty desk. He told her to open her shirt. To pull up her bra. To take down her knickers. Then he instructed her on exactly how to touch herself: how to stroke and press at her nipples, how to circle her clitoris, how to push her fingers up inside herself. As she neared her climax, he told her to close her eyes. She obeyed, and could only hear him as he crossed the room, pulled out his cock, and came on the inside of her thigh.

She wanted to kiss him, to touch him, and to make him come.

But she was his to do with as he liked.

She’d realized it one night, alone, lying in the dark of her room, and it had made her flush with what she could only call exhilaration.

She had consented to give him her body in a way no other man had ever possessed it, without once being penetrated by him.

She didn’t understand it, but she felt no need to.

Today, her eyelids fell halfway closed as his hands pulled her against his leg again, and then again.

He watched her from behind his spectacles.

“You’ll come like this, won’t you,” he said, telling, not asking.

She could only blush in answer.

“You have the most responsive body, do you know that?” he asked in a low voice. “I wonder how many times you could be made to come in an hour. Or in a day.”

She shuddered.

She was going to soak his trousers, if she hadn’t already.

“May I touch you, Sir? Please?”

She asked him every time. She couldn't help herself.

“No.” He slapped the side of her thigh. “You have to get back downstairs, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’d better stay focused.”

“You want me to come for you quickly, Sir?”

“Yes.”

She let her eyes fall closed, and began rolling her hips against him with singular intensity.

It wouldn’t take long.

It never took long, unless he wanted it to.

His hands moved up under her skirt, and slid beneath the hem of her knickers to grasp at her backside.

She pushed against him faster, and within a few short moments, her thighs began to clench down hard around him.

"Like that. Just like that." His hands dug into her skin and urged her on, pulling at her roughly, and she fell forward as she came, mouthing at the shoulder of his suit jacket while her hips jerked against him.

He let her stay like that until she'd finished coming down, then pushed at her thighs.

"You'd better resume your duties, Miss Parkinson, before you're missed."

She rose, refusing to look down at the dark patch on Percy's trouser leg.

"May I clean myself up, Sir?"

He pushed at the bridge of his glasses as he turned in his chair.

"Yes, you better had." He flipped open the file she'd brought him and began leafing through the parchment inside.

"You'll be down at the luncheon?"

"Of course." He glanced briefly up at her. "My mother has indicated she'll be there, did she respond to the invitation?"

"Yes, and I have you seated with her and your father at one of the tables at the front of the room."

"Thank you, Miss Parkinson." He snapped the file closed and moved it to one of his piles. "Where have you seated yourself?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"I didn't. I'll be floating, making sure the table service goes as expected, ensuring the Minister hands out the proper pins. That sort of thing."

He shook his head. “Yes. Of course.”

“If there isn’t anything else you need seen to, Sir”- she looked at him with as much reproach as she dared- “may I please be excused to go back downstairs?”

“You may.”

“Arthur Weasley,” Kingsley Shacklebolt called out. Arthur rose from his place at the table at the front of the room, and headed to the podium. “For 35 years of service to the Ministry,” said Shacklebolt. Arthur beamed as he shook Shacklebolt’s hand, and leaned in as Pansy affixed a gold pin with the number _35_ embossed over the top of the Ministry seal to his lapel.

“Thank you, dear,” said Arthur, giving Pansy a warm smile, and for some unknown reason, her stomach flipped.

For the next hour, she ensured that the paid Ministry elves had everything they needed to serve chevre and tomato quiche, spinach and orange salad, ginger grapefruit fizzes and all of the other luncheon menu items the Ministry Party Committee had decided on.

She did not watch Percy, sitting beside his mother, talking and smiling politely with his parents and the rest of his table.

Nor did she follow his progress through dessert, nor his responses to the slide show she’d organized with pictures of the honorees over their years at the Ministry.

She was careful to avoid looking at him, in particular, as she approached Arthur where he stood helping Molly on with her coat. Pansy held a wide, rectangular book in her hands, with a dark brown leather cover embossed with the letters _AW_.

“Pardon me, Mr. Weasley,” she said, and he turned his attention to her. “I was made aware that your 30th year of service wasn’t recognized”- her skin prickled briefly at the oblique reference to those dark, broken years- “when it ought to have been. I took the liberty of putting together a book of photographs for you. It covers your three decades with the Ministry.”

She couldn’t stop herself from flicking her eyes briefly to Percy, who was staring at her solemnly.

Arthur opened the book, and broke into a wide smile.

“Molly, look at this,” he said, tilting the book toward his wife.

“Oh, look how young you were!” Molly laughed at a picture of an extremely thin, gangling Arthur sitting at a wooden desk chair, wearing a set of brown robes with a goldenrod and olive green plaid shirt, and waving nervously at the camera. “This must have been practically your first day. You look terrified.” She looked inquiringly at Pansy. “Wherever did you find these?”

“I put a call out for pictures of Arthur with the different departments as soon as I joined the Party Committee, and there was a lovely response.” Pansy turned to Arthur. “You’ll be happy to learn that you’re very well liked around the building, Mr. Weasley. I was able to get at least one photo from each of the last 35 years. They’re in chronological order. Everyone was more than happy to dig up their most embarrassing pictures of you.” She winked at him, and he laughed.

“Thank you, Miss Parkinson,” said Percy. Pansy looked at him, tried to read his expression, and failed. “I had no idea. This was incredibly thoughtful of you.”

“Look, Arthur, I did bring in all seven of them at least once.” Molly was pointing at a photograph of Arthur at his desk, with a struggling, half-grown mustache, looking bemused, and surrounded by all seven of his children. “We were just having an argument about this.”

“That was”- Arthur looked at the date that Pansy had carefully written in at the bottom of the picture- “29th November of ‘81.”

“That would have been Bill’s 11th birthday,” said Molly. “I remember he wanted to come and see you on the day, as he was going off to Hogwarts the following year. So we did. Gods, Ginny was such a squalling little thing.”

In the picture, a small infant Ginny sat in the crook of Arthur’s left arm, pink-faced and silently protesting.

“Percy’s awfully smart in that one, in his little shirt and tie. And Charlie looks so dashing. I adore the look on Fred’s face,” said Pansy, pointing at the little boy sitting on Arthur’s right knee. She stopped suddenly, and couldn’t bring herself to look up at any of them.

To her relief, both Arthur and Molly smiled widely.

“He looks like the cat that’s got the cream,” said Molly. “I wonder what he’d managed that I wasn’t aware of.”

“How could you tell that was Fred?” asked Percy. His voice was sharp. “Their own mother couldn’t tell them apart half the time.”

Pansy flushed.

“He had a mole, at the side of his neck, and his mouth tilted up just that much more on the left side when he smiled,” she said. “I recalled it from school. I have no doubt that Molly could tell, but I imagine that her attention was a bit fragmented on occasion.”

Molly laughed heartily, and Pansy found she was able to breathe again.

“Who did you say that you were, dear?” Molly asked Pansy.

“Pansy Parkinson. I’m…” she stopped, and looked at Percy. His face remained completely blank. “I’m your son’s secretary.”

“Oh! Of course. He hasn’t said a single word about you, which, as far as Percy is concerned, is a ringing endorsement.” She looked at Percy. “You ought to bring her round for dinner on Sunday, Percy. She’d be entirely welcome.”

Pansy’s pulse jumped.

“I’m sure Miss Parkinson has better plans, Mother. Shall I walk you to the lifts?”

Pansy watched the three of them walk away, and couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d somehow done something terribly wrong.

By the time Pansy helped clear away the tablecloths and box up the votives, it was 2 o’clock.

“How’s it been up here, Ines?” she asked, pushing the door to the Ministry for Justice open with her hip. “Can you help me with this box? I have floral arrangements to send home with you and Kath.”

Ines circled around the front desk, and grabbed the box under Pansy’s left arm.

“You’ve had a fleet of memos in the last hour. And Secretary Weasley’s gone home.”

Pansy started.

“What do you mean, he’s gone home?”

Ines hoisted the box onto the desk.

“He came up here after lunch, and said that he wasn’t feeling well, and would be going home early. About ten minutes later, he left wearing his coat.”

“But he’s never ill. And he never leaves early.”

Ines shrugged. “I know, it was very unlike him. But I suppose even the strongest among us must fall to a headache every now and again. He’s certainly not one to make excuses to check out early for weekend plans. He may have left some kind of message for you, you’ll have to go and look.”

There was no message from him on Pansy’s desk, and when she opened the door to his office, his desk was clear, just as it was at the end of each work day.

She began to sort through the pile of memos on her own desk, setting them in order of priority, and creating a stack to carry through to him the following Monday morning.

Underneath a bundle of rolled parchment was a folder from the Minister’s office, labeled "URGENT" in bright red block letters, with a note scribbled on a square of fluorescent yellow sticky parchment attached to the outside.

Pansy read over the note written on it, flipped through the folder, and brought it over to the front desk.

“Sorry to trouble you, Ines, but the note on this says that Secretary Weasley’s signature is needed before the end of the day.”

Ines took it from Pansy and looked it over.

“I’m not sure what to do,” Pansy admitted. “It’s labeled as a sensitive document. Shall I Owl it to him? He’s always been here for this type of thing, and we’ve certainly never discussed a contingency plan for his being ill.”

“Hmm. I wouldn’t Owl it, not without consulting the mail room downstairs. I know it can be done, but it might take a bit. It may be simplest just to run it by his flat, I believe he lives quite close.”

Pansy frowned. "Do you think he’d mind terribly?”

“He’s not exactly known for leaving his work at work," Ines laughed. "Even if he’s laid up, I’m sure a quick ask for a signature shoved under the door won’t ruffle him too bad. Shall I fetch the address for you?”

“I suppose so, thanks. Can you let Kath know about the flowers when she comes back from downstairs? I’m sure I’ll be back within half an hour.”

It was a warm day, but overcast, with a haze of smoke-colored clouds showering the street with bursts of noncommittal rain.

Pansy left the Ministry via the Floo to Diagon Alley, then walked the rest of the way to a neat cobblestone street two blocks south, where Percy lived on the top floor of a cottage flat.

The red brick building was well cared for, with a wrought iron gate opening noiselessly onto a walkway ending at a neatly maintained black-painted front door. Beside it, window boxes overflowed with pink and violet petunias, dusky and washed out in the dim afternoon. Pansy rang the doorbell with a nervous hand, and waited.

She expected him to look unwell, so when he opened his door dressed in a pair of close-fitting black joggers and a grey tee shirt completely soaked through with sweat, she thought for a moment that he was gravely ill.

But then she noted his trainers.

“Oh. Have you been out for a run?”

He swiped the back of his wrist over his forehead.

"Yes. I've only just returned."

“I’m so sorry to disturb you.”

He said nothing.

She held up the file with the fluorescent yellow note. “A file came down from the Minister’s office that requires your signature before the end of the day. I would have Owled it, but it’s labeled as sensitive, and I wasn’t sure how it ought to be handled.”

Percy said nothing. He only waited for a moment that stretched out a second too long, then turned and walked inside, leaving Pansy to follow him through and shut the front door behind herself.

She trailed after him up a steep flight of stairs, and through a second door at the top, into the front room of a small but impeccably kept flat.

He’d decorated there, too, in the sparing style of his office. The walls were painted a stormy grey, and the furniture was plain: a sofa and a pair of chairs in honeyed wood and smooth black leather, designed with the same philosophical commitment to attractive utility as the ones in his office. An unpatterned and probably impractical cream-colored rug lay underneath.

A dining table and six chairs sat at the opposite side of the room, all polished and gleaming teak, adjacent to a streamlined and modern open kitchen with sober black cabinets.

Numerous windows lined the perimeter of the room, several with neat, flourishing potted plants at their sills, and Pansy imagined that on a bright day they would admit an abundance of cheerful sun. Today only a little daylight, pale and withdrawn, filtered through from the muggy summer outside.

A door in the opposite wall stood open, and through it, Pansy imagined, was his bedroom.

She paused in the entryway, not sure of what to say, while he crossed into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and drank it down without stopping.

He set the glass down next to the sink, wiped his mouth on his arm, then turned to her, leaning back against the edge of the counter.

“You need my signature.”

"Yes," she said. "I’m so sorry. I know you went home ill, but it was urgent. I wasn’t sure what to do.”

“I’m not ill.”

“Alright.”

He held out his hand.

“Give it here, then.”

She walked over to him, and handed him the file. He flipped it open, and she watched him skim several pages before flipping back to the first.

Without a word, he walked through the door to the rear part of the flat, and emerged holding a quill. He signed the first page, snapped the file folder shut, and held it out to her.

“Here you go.”

She took it, and tucked it underneath her arm.

“Thank you, Sir.”

By way of acknowledgement, he tilted his head.

She was at the door with her hand on the knob when she stopped, and turned back around.

“Have I done something wrong, Sir?”

He was still leaning against the counter.

Still soaked in sweat.

He looked at her with what seemed like indifference.

“No. You haven’t.”

She shifted the file under her arm.

“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Secretary, but I can’t help but feel that I have.”

He scoffed.

Still without saying anything, he pulled a bottle of Scotch down from an upper cabinet. He fetched down a tumbler, dropped a single cube of ice into it, then pulled open the bottle and filled the tumbler by a third.

He leaned back against the counter, knocked the contents of the glass back in two fluid swallows, then refilled it.

“Can I offer you a drink, Miss Parkinson?”

“Thank you, but I have to decline. I've rather fallen out of the habit of day drinking."

“Have you?" One eyebrow rose. "Why would that be?”

“I have a job.”

“You do. And so do I."

She worried at the corner of her lip with her teeth.

“I also think that you wouldn’t like it. If I still drank too much.”

She could actually see his breath hitch from across the room.

He pulled off his glasses, and rubbed at his eyes with one hand.

“What difference does it make what I like?” He replaced his glasses and looked at her, distant and stolid.

“It makes all the difference,” she said.

He shook his head, laughed, and looked down at the floor.

When he brought his eyes back to her, he looked incredibly tired.

“That fucking dress.”

Her hands clutched at her skirt.

“What about my dress?”

His eyes trailed down her body, then back up to her face.

“Do you know what you’re doing? You’re a smart girl, I can’t imagine it’s unintentional.”

“What am I doing?”

He took a slow sip of his Scotch.

“Ruining my fucking life.”

The surface of her skin rose into gooseflesh. She was suddenly, acutely aware of the heavy closeness and humidity of the day.

"How am I ruining your life?”

“Gods, I'm sorry.” He looked away from her and out one of the muted windows. “That was a terrible thing to have said." He set down his tumbler. "You need to go. I’ll see you in the office on Monday morning.”

“No,” she said, too sharp and too loud.

He stared back at her.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“No, you don’t get to say something like that, and then dismiss me as though you've just finished dictating a memo. I find that I’m out of the habit of ruining lives other than my own. If at all possible I’d like to be made aware of it when it happens so that I can stop.”

The color rose at the base of his neck.

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do? If I asked it?”

She drew in a slow breath, and then breathed out.

She’d thought about it—answered this question for herself, because in the moment it had occurred to her, it had been frightening.

But she'd interrogated herself with honesty and care, and taken comfort in the certainty that there were things she wouldn’t do.

He’d never asked for them, and, given his apparent tastes, she doubted that he would.

“I do have preferences. And limits, if that’s what you mean.”

“What are those limits?”

“I don’t know what they all are, but I could tell you the ones that I'm aware of. And I think we could find the rest.”

He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and simply breathed.

After a long while, he looked back at her again.

“Take it off.” His voice was quiet.

She looked down.

“My dress?”

“Your dress.”

She regarded him, then crouched down to lay the folder on the floorboards. Rising to stand again, she reached an arm behind her back, and found one of the long tails of ribbon between her shoulder blades.

She pulled, and everything came undone.

She slid the dress down over first one shoulder, then the next, then pushed it down over her hips. It fell into a ring of red around her feet.

She wasn’t wearing a bra.

He watched her coolly.

“Take off your knickers.”

She hooked her thumbs below the waistband of her knickers, and slid them down over her legs and off of her feet.

She was left in her stockings and suspenders, and still wearing her high heels.

“Now the rest.”

Without hesitating, she kicked off her shoes, and one by one unhooked her suspenders from the tops of her stockings before letting the suspender belt fall, and drawing each stocking down her legs.

She was bare.

He took another drink.

“Come here.”

She took one step toward him, but he held up his hand.

“No. On your hands and knees.”

She balked.

She had limits.

She sifted through them in her mind, and couldn't find this among them.

She dropped down to her hands and knees, and with deliberation, crawled across the floor to him.

His eyes tracked her progress.

Once she was a scant foot away from him, she sat back on her heels, looked up at him, and waited.

She tried to read the expression on his face as he studied her.

He picked up his tumbler, and took another drink.

“Open your mouth, Miss Parkinson.”

She opened her mouth.

He dipped two fingers inside his glass and drew them out, dripping with liquid, then brought them down to her lips.

He pushed in slowly, sliding over the surface of her tongue.

She closed her lips around him, and stroked her tongue around the length and tip of each finger, yielding as they urged toward the back of her throat.

He tasted of honey and smokey salt, brine and vanilla.

Just before his fingers triggered her reflex to gag, he pulled them back. As they withdrew from the warm suction of her mouth, she pressed her lips firmly over their tips.

“Ask me for what you want,” he said.

There was one question she could never leave alone, always ready at the tip of her tongue.

“May I touch you, Sir?”

He didn’t move.

“ _Please_.” He would let her. He had to.

“I’m going to pull your hair," he said.

When she nodded, he brought his hand down and pushed it up into the back of her hair, gripped it, and began to pull.

It skirted the edge of pain, but didn't quite reach it, and her body responded with a tightening low in her belly.

Under his grip, she rose to her feet.

His hand didn’t move from her hair. He used the leverage to push her back against the edge of the counter, and then to tilt her head upward.

His sweat gathered on his skin, the smell of it present but clean, something real and imperfect on the smooth surface of him.

Want bloomed between her legs.

“You may,” he said.

She brought her hands up and pushed them through the back of his still damp hair, and her body hummed.

She gripped his hair, twisted her fingers in it, mussed it, then dropped her hands to his chest and smoothed her fingers over the clinging damp of his tee shirt.

“Will you take this off?" she asked, tugging at the hem. "Please?"

He let go of her hair, and pulled the shirt off over his head.

“Thank you.” She breathed out her gratitude as she felt the smooth surface of him underneath her fingertips. He was lean and unyielding, painted with a scattered host of soft, pale freckles across his chest, arms, and belly.

She ran her fingers down the center of his chest, down his abdomen, around his navel, and below, until he grabbed her wrist, pulled it behind her back, and pressed her into the counter.

“That’s enough.”

She wanted to cry out at him.

“ _Please_.”

“No. What else do you want? You’ve had rather a few requests in the past.”

She wanted his mouth.

“I want you to kiss me.”

“Ask.”

“Will you please kiss me, Sir?”

She thought that it would take time—that she would be able to linger in the moment of expectancy before it happened—but in a concert of rapid movement, he threw his glasses down on the counter without folding them, and his hand found its way back into her hair.

He pulled her head back, and his mouth was on hers.

Like everything else that he had become to her, his kiss was a demand that she met, easy and untroubled.

He licked once at her bottom lip, then when she opened to him, dove into her mouth, drawing out a moan from low in her throat.

She wanted to touch him again, but he held her wrist pinned at her back.

He continued to take her mouth with his, pulling at her hair, and pressed his hips into her belly.

He was hard, pushing against her with an insistent, involuntary rhythm. She responded with pressure in kind, until they arched against the fabric that separated them like a pair of youth not entirely sure of what was supposed to happen next.

“Ask for me what you want, Miss Parkinson," he said, more breath than speech.

She started to shiver.

“Fuck me," she pleaded, pettish and urgent.

“Ask me politely.”

“Fuck me, please. _Please_.”

His hands fell to the backs of her thighs and lifted her up to sit on the edge of his counter.

He pushed her legs open, then shoved the front of his trousers and trunks out of his way. Holding her leg open with one hand, he grabbed the shaft of his cock in the other, then pressed himself against the visibly wet opening of her cunt.

“Is this what you've wanted so very much?” he asked.

“ _Yes._ ”

He shoved into her with one stroke.

He was inside of her, all of him, at once. She cried out against the sudden pressure, and clenched his arm while he drew back, then fucked into her hard, and then repeated himself, jolting her frame against the cool surface underneath her.

Without breaking his stroke he clutched the undersides of both of her thighs and pushed them up until her toes brushed the counter, opening her wide to him. She looked up at him, watching him while he watched himself moving inside her.

“ _Fuck, Pansy,_ ” he said, his voice low.

He let go of her legs, grabbed the back of her hair again, and brought her mouth to his, angling her head up to press bruisingly at her lips.

When he'd taken all the breath she had, his mouth left hers to find her breast. He devoured her there, pulsing his tongue against her until she began to make little animalistic sounds at the back of her throat.

He didn’t change the rhythm of his cock, driving into her without regard for the tense arch of her hips as she sought out the fastest possible relief for the pressure building inside of her.

The moment she began to clench inside, he leaned away and searched her face. “You’re going to come.”

He could feel it, she thought. The way she tightened around him.

“Yes.”

“Not yet.” It was a demand and a reproach.

He pulled out abruptly, and tucked his cock back under the waistband of his trousers.

He kissed her mouth hard before lifting her with one arm under her backside and the other steady at her back.

Then he walked them both toward the open door in the rear of the flat.

As they moved through the room, her arms strung around his neck, she brought her mouth to his throat, drawing her lips over his skin and licking at his pulse.

At the threshold of his bedroom he groaned, then swerved to press her up against the door frame and kiss her, his cock pressed hard between her legs.

At the end of a breathless pull of his lips, he tightened his hold around her, and carried her to the end of his bed.

He set her down with care, but the moment her feet met the rug laid beneath the bed, he circled her waist with his hands, spun her to face away from him, and pushed her forward with a palm between her shoulder blades.

“On your knees and elbows, with your head down.”

Heart thundering, she complied, crawling onto the bed and lowering her cheek to the mattress.

She heard him remove his trainers and socks, then his trousers and pants. Finally, his hand groped at her hip, and she felt the tip of his cock sliding against her soaking cunt.

“You're in my bed,” he said, “And I’m going to fuck you however I like in it.”

"Yes, Sir."

“What will you say if you want it to stop?”

“I’ll say ‘stop’.”

“Good.”

He leaned down to grasp a handful of her hair as he pushed into her, pulled back, then fucked her at a pace that made her bite her lip to avoid crying out, his hand on her hip yanking her back to deepen his thrusts.

“Is this what you’ve thought of me doing to you?” he asked, his voice faltering to the rhythm of his hips. 

“Yes." Her voice was nothing more than a half-choked sob.

“And you like it. This is what you’ve wanted from me.”

“ _Yes._ ”

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, Sir."

“Should I come inside you like this, and send you back to the office with it dripping down your leg?”

“ _Yes, Sir._ "

“ _No_.”

He pulled out again, flipped her over onto her back, pushed her thighs up to her chest, and dropped down to his knees on the floor.

His mouth was on her cunt, and without any overture he licked and sucked at her clit, pushed two fingers inside of her, and moved against her with a steady, repetitive pressure.

She surprised even herself with how quickly she came, moaning into the quiet room and tightening hard around his fingers.

“Gods, you’re so good." He carefully watched her expression, still pressing his fingers into her as she came down. Before she could fully catch her breath, he moved up her body and kissed her until she couldn’t breathe at all. Then he pulled away, lifted her from the waist, threw her further up the bed, spread her legs wide apart, took his cock in his hand and pushed inside her again.

She’d wondered for three long months what it would be like to be fucked by him.

She thought he’d want to pound into her and leave her aching.

Slap her arse until it bruised.

Fuck her mouth.

And she had been wrong.

He didn't just want to use her body, and he didn’t necessarily want to hurt it.

He wanted to own it.

He tossed her across his bed as though she weighed nothing at all. Flipped her over from her back to her belly, from her belly to her side. Moved her arms, her legs, her head, with a hard grip in her hair, until she was where he wanted her to be, then he fucked her until he needed to stop. She let go, completely, and gave everything over to him. Sometimes he went hard, sometimes slow, and when it became too much, he pulled out of her and made her come—with his mouth, or his hands–and when she did, he kissed her and called her his good, perfect, beautiful girl.

At the end, she was incoherent.

Coated in a sheen of sweat, her hair dripping, she came for the last time lying on her side at the end of his bed with her knees held together in his left hand, while he fucked her in a rolling rhythm, circling her clit with the pad of his right thumb.

“ _Please,"_ she whispered. _"Please._ ”

She wasn’t sure what she was asking for anymore.

“I’m going to come inside you."

She sobbed.

“One more, Pansy," he said. "You can give me one more.”

She could, and she did.

While she cried out and crushed the wreckage of his bed sheets in her fists, he fucked her hard, taking her shoulder in his hand and pulling her down against himself with each thrust.

“ _Fuck._ ” He groaned and dropped down over her, pressing his forehead to the side of her arm. She felt his cock spilling inside of her, his hips jerking against the back of her thigh, and then he was mouthing at her skin, tasting the salt of her sweat.

“You’re shivering." Genuine concern laced through his voice, and she realized that she was shaking all over, still clutching his sheets.

He pulled out of her with a shudder, moved away, then was back in a moment with his wand in his hand. After a muttered charm she felt warm all over, and the shaking began to subside.

“Come here." He didn't wait for her to respond. He pulled her up the bed, wrapped her in a clean, warm blanket, then tucked up her body and held her tight against his chest.

His breath moved through him deep and ragged.

“You were perfect,” he said. “You were so fucking good.” He muttered his praise against her skin, and pressed kisses into her forehead, dragging his fingertips slowly across her scalp, until she fell asleep.

She dozed, waking halfway several times to vague impressions of sound and movement.

A shower running.

Percy looking in a mirror, looping his tie.

The idea, fleeting and dreamlike, of warm breath at her temple.

She had a brief dream about looking for Percy’s glasses, and finding them broken on the floor, surrounded by dozens of silently shouting yellow parchment crows.

When she fully woke, the clock on Percy’s bedroom wall read 4:30.

She had only been asleep for about an hour, but the light outside had already changed, his flat washed in the drowsy golden yellow of western light in the afternoon.

The clouds must have cleared.

The first thought to intrude was about the file.

She threw off the blanket. Suddenly self-conscious about her nudity, she drew it back around her, then walked out into Percy’s living room.

It was quiet and empty, and the file wasn’t on the floor by the door.

Percy, she realized, wasn’t there, either.

There was a parchment on the table, filled in with his perfect handwriting.

_Miss Parkinson,_

_I’ve taken the signed paperwork back to the Ministry._

_There are fresh towels in the washroom; please feel free to shower before you leave. Tea can be found in the cabinet to the left of the sink, and your clothes are folded on the chair in my bedroom._

_I have a prior engagement this evening, and won’t return home until late. The front door will lock itself as you go._

_Best wishes for a lovely weekend._

_P.W._

Pansy stared and stared at the page.

No matter how many times she tried, she couldn’t make any sense of what he’d written there.

“You don't look like yourself this morning, love,” said Kath with concern in her voice. “Secretary Weasley said you’d suddenly been taken ill on Friday. I can’t wonder that there was something off about the quiche.”

Pansy channeled her best impression of her mother and gave Kath a clear, neutral smile as she sailed by, and placed her bag and light jacket on their hooks next to her desk.

It was Monday morning, and she had spent the weekend aligning her post-coital expectations with the odious letter left to her by Percy in his apartment. She’d been forced to accept that between the lines was the clear communication that what had happened between them, hadn’t.

She felt a searing and persistent pain inside, like the deep, throbbing ache left behind after a bad burn, but she’d worn her nicest skirt and a beautiful blouse, curled her hair, and put on her make-up like nothing had changed.

She'd sprayed a single mist of her favorite scent in the crook of each elbow, for herself.

Not for him.

For the first time in her career with him at the Ministry, he was late.

When he finally walked by her desk at 8:07, Pansy was already in the middle of responding to a memo about the monthly birthday recognition rota.

“Good morning, Miss Parkinson,” he said as he walked by.

“Secretary Weasley.” She didn’t look up.

He went into his office, and closed the door.

She straightened her quills, topped off her ink pot, and prepared herself to be his secretary.

At his ten o’clock and two o’clock meetings he may have fidgeted with the button on his left cuff, but she wouldn’t have known, because she was there for the sole purpose of taking notes.

She responded to his memos, and passed along the ones he needed to see.

She fetched his files.

She scheduled his meetings.

She carried his lunch to him, and forwent the chocolate biscuit.

She sent him snow white crows with short, neatly written lines about what he needed to do and see and know about his work.

She brought him his tea, hot, with one sugar and a generous splash of milk, left it on his desk, and responded to his thanks with a nod.

At 3 o’clock, she returned to her desk from his afternoon meeting to a pile of memos.

An alert to a minor policy change within the DMLE.

An alteration to the docket order for the Wizengamot on Thursday.

A notice about a missing waterproof cape, dark blue, and if found, could it pleased be returned to Ann in the Owlery.

Endless meetings to fit into Percy’s calendar.

And a letter from HR, noting that Percy’s transfer to Magical Games and Sports was approved, pending signatures on the appropriate documents.

When Pansy pushed the door to his office open, he was standing near his window, watering his plants.

She stalked across the room, and slapped the letter down on top of his desk.

“Were you going to tell me,” she asked, trying to keep her breathing under control, “or was I going to walk in with your tea one morning to find someone else sitting at your desk?”

Percy turned around and looked at her.

He didn’t look like himself, either.

He was in his washing day suit, the black one, and the pale pink spot at his jaw suggested that he’d nicked himself shaving again. His tie wasn’t as straight as usual, and she had to fight the urge to walk over and fix it for him.

He vanished the small tin watering can he’d been using, and leaned his shoulder against the nearest bookcase.

His expression was, as it so often seemed to be, inscrutable.

“Good afternoon, Miss Parkinson. It’s been a busy day, I feel we’ve barely communicated.”

“Who's barely communicated?” she shot out. “I’ve been perfectly civil.”

“Yes, you have been. You also haven’t looked at me once today, which is perhaps a bit awkward as I’ve spoken to you directly several times.”

“I’m doing my job, Mr. Secretary. Is there anything wrong with how I’ve performed my duties?”

He pushed his hands into his pockets. “No.”

“Then there’s no problem. I’m just sorry to have to find out that I’m going to have a new direct supervisor from a fucking memo.”

“You’ll watch your language in my office, Miss Parkinson.”

“Or what?”

He said nothing, but she saw him color.

“I suppose that won’t be my concern after the end of next week,” he said. He sat down at his desk, and began dealing with his paperwork.

She couldn’t breathe.

“ _Why?_ " There was no keeping the sting she felt out of her voice.

“A career change, Miss Parkinson. A simple lateral move. It’s done all the time.”

“This is a lateral move into a political backwater. You know it, and I know it. No Minister has ever come out of fucking Games and Sports. Ever.”

He shifted a stack of papers, and dipped his quill into his inkwell.

“What did I do wrong?” she asked, and she flushed in shame at the emotion behind it. “Did I embarrass you in front of your parents? Did I not fuck you how you liked?”

He threw his quill down on his desk, splattering ink across a stack of pages, and dropped his head into his hands.

“If you want to stop, just say that you want to stop.” Pansy swallowed against the tension in her throat. “I’m not some madwoman who won’t let you go, I hope you understand that. But don’t write me a carefully worded note telling me not to let the door hit me on the way out after you’ve had done with me, and then the following week, disappear. It’s awful.”

She wasn’t crying, but she might as well have been.

She felt ill.

“I have to leave, Pansy. Change departments. I can’t keep doing this.”

“Alright. If you want to stop, we'll stop." For the first time in her life, she knew what it felt like to be physically hurt by her own words. "But there’s no reason for you to have to change jobs. I can just be your secretary. I’m good at this.”

He laughed. “No. You can't just be my secretary."

“Then fire me, or send me to another department.”

He finally looked up at her.

“Do you have any idea how comprehensively unethical and immoral it would be to fire my secretary because I can’t seem to prevent myself from fucking her?”

Pansy shut her mouth, and stared at him.

“I have _—_ I _had—_ both of those things, you know. Ethics. Morals.” He put his head in his hands again. “I tried so _fucking_ hard to not fuck you.”

She watched him pull off his glasses, rub his eyes, and put them back on.

“But apparently not hard enough.” His mouth twitched at the corner, and he looked at her like he’d lost something important to him.

“I could quit,” she said. “I can always find another position. If I did, we could … ” she looked out the window. It was a cruelly beautiful day, wherever it was. “Could we see each other? If I didn’t work for you?”

He drew in a deep breath.

“That’s not a good idea.”

Pansy clenched her fists.

“Why not?” She didn’t recognize herself in this woman begging for answers.

His jaw clenched.

" _Why not_?" she asked again.

She said it loud enough that he glanced over her shoulder at the door.

“Because I won’t stop.”

She shook her head. “What does that mean?”

He leaned back in his chair, and ran his hand through his hair.

“Do you have any idea the sorts of things I’ve thought about doing to you, Pansy?” He looked at her intently.

She could probably guess some of them.

“Did you know that every time Jonathan Gable speaks to you familiarly,” he continued, “every time I catch that absolute cunt _looking_ at you, I imagine hauling him into my office so he can watch me kneel you down, tie your ankles to your wrists, and come on your tits? So that he’ll know who you belong to. It’s absolute animal bullshit, but the thought of marking you as _mine_ gets me so hard it hurts. I see you in your little skirts, whatever I want you to wear, doing your work better than you have any business to, and I want to punish you for absolutely nothing. No _—_ I want you to want me to punish you. I want you to beg for it. And when that part's done, I want to fuck you. Sometimes I want to do both at the same time."

Her skin felt hot.

“And what if, gods forbid, someday what you actually want from me _—_ what you accept willingly _—_ isn’t enough?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What if one day I were to wake up, and really want to hurt you?” There was both a roughness and a fragility to his voice she'd never heard before.

She was confused. “You won’t. That’s not what this is about.”

“How can you know that?”

“Do you want to hurt me now?” She rolled her eyes in frustration. “I mean in ways that I don’t want to be hurt?”

He shook his head. “No. Of course not.”

“Then what is there to worry about?”

He stood up, pulled off his jacket and threw it hard over the back of his chair, then walked around to the front of his desk and leaned against it.

“If we keep doing this,” he said, staring at his folded hands while he spoke, “within a week, I’m going to be using your cunt between meetings, then jerking off at home to the idea of you walking around the office with my come inside you. I’ll have you on your knees on that rug, fucking your mouth in the middle of the workday like you’re some kind of cheap wh _—_ ”

“ _No._ ” The word approached a shout. “No. You don’t use that word. Never that word. Never the ones like it."

He looked up at her in shock.

"You asked about my limits. That is a limit. You can fuck me. You can punish me. You can own me, gods, _please_ own me, and I’ll even agree to play at your petty games with other men, but you're not allowed to call me that. And you're not allowed to make this sound ugly. It isn't ugly.” Her voice cracked on the final word.

His expression was utterly broken as he stood up and crossed the room.

“Gods, no. No.” Then he was around her, and on her, looping his arms around her waist and pulling her into him. “I'm sorry.” He kissed her cheek, just below her eye. “I'm so sorry. I didn't mean _—_ I'll never say it again. I've never thought it. You're so beautiful. You're so fucking perfect.”

He put kisses across her face, her jaw, down her throat, and when she brought her hands up and pushed them into his hair, he caught her mouth and kissed her with the same unapologetic appetite he’d devoured her with less than three days earlier.

She pulled at his hair, and he let her, while his hands yanked her skirt up around her waist and then moved under the sides of her knickers to grip her backside.

“I can’t do this anymore, Pansy,” he said in the breath before he took her mouth again with his, and his hands continued to move against her. “Tell me to stop.”

_Don’t stop._

As he kissed her again, she brought her hands down to his belt buckle, and began pulling it loose.

He groaned into her mouth, and pushed them both back to his desk.

Clutching the back of her hair in his fist, he pulled her away from himself, then spun her around to face the window.

His arm came around her side, and pushed everything off the surface of his desk onto the floor. She watched every stack of parchment, squared to the edges of the desk, become a flurry of rustling chaos in the air for a moment before settling down in what looked like irretrievable disarray on the rug.

“Hands and elbows on the desk,” he ordered, and before she’d finished complying, his spectacles were discarded in front of her, and he had pulled her knickers down to her knees.

She heard the sound of his belt buckle coming undone.

There was the brief, soft sound of a lowering zip, and then the head of his cock slid against her cunt.

“I never want you more than I want you like this,” he murmured.

He pushed into her, and she bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from shouting.

There was no time for adjustment; he began with rough and unremitting strokes at a pace that made her gasp.

He leaned forward and drew her back toward him by her hair, turned her head, and grasped her mouth with his. As he kissed her and fucked her hard over his desk, Pansy thought that there was nothing any other man could ever do or be that would compare to him in that moment.

He was so good.

He was so fucking perfect.

Neither of them had silenced the room, and when Percy grabbed her hand and pushed it between her legs, she let his kisses quiet the sounds she made at the feeling of circling her fingers over herself while he fucked her.

He shoved her shirt open, pushed aside the cups of her bra, and the unsettled way he moved between her breasts, clutching at her with a distracted urgency, told her that he was already getting close.

She broke away from his mouth. “Shall I come quickly?”

“ _Yes_.”

She rolled her fingers over herself in the way that she needed to, and within a few short moments, she felt her body tilt up and over the rise of a hard, sudden climax.

As she gasped against his mouth, his hips jerked into her, and he answered her with a groan, pressing his open mouth against hers.

She was pushing back against him, absorbing the sensation of his cock’s diminishing pulses inside her while his kisses began to take form against her mouth again, when someone knocked on the door.

“Pardon me, Secretary Weasley, but Mr. Simmons has come by to see you.”

Every nerve ending inside Pansy light up at once.

“Oh my gods,” whispered Percy.

Pansy’s mind moved quickly.

“The Secretary is on a brief Floo call,” she called out. She winced as Percy’s cock withdrew. “I’ll be there in a moment to see to Mr. Simmons. Thank you very much, Ines.”

She heard Percy adjusting himself, the sound of his zip and belt buckle, and she pulled her knickers up, trying to ignore the sensation of him leaking down the inside of her thigh.

She’d had a few quick, desperate fucks in her life, and stifled a perverse laugh at the thought of how narrowly she’d avoided it being Percy himself who she’d had to outwit in the halls at Hogwarts, hair and clothes fixed with hasty spells after fumbling assignations behind the statuary.

As she tucked and adjusted her clothes, smoothed her hair, and fixed the edges of her lipstick, she watched the papers on the floor fluttering back up to the desk, the quills righting themselves in their holder, and for the first time saw the ink pot on the floor, its black contents spread out all over the grey rug, but now flowing back inside. It rose slowly, and settled back into its place on Percy’s desk, all right angles restored.

Before she crossed to open the door, she looked back at Percy, now standing behind his desk, adjusting his suit jacket into place.

He looked neat and professional, and the expression on his face was one of absolute self-loathing.

“Say something," she said.

He waited a long time before he spoke.

“I don’t want to be this man, Pansy.” He gestured at his desk.

She had grown accustomed to the feeling of being held by him, in the inexplicable way that belonged only to them. But as the floor vanished beneath her, he opened up his arms, and let go.

She fell fast away into nothing.

“I want—” he paused, took a breath, then started again. “I want to be a husband, before too long. I'm older than you are. I plan to be a kind and faithful one. And the sort of father whose children want to visit him at work." He looked away and swallowed, the corners of his mouth pulling down. Then he looked back at her. "I do not want to be the sort of man who hurts women. Or one in the habit of fucking his secretary.”

She sucked in a breath.

“It’s been a habit, then?”

_Don’t say there have been others._

_Please._

_Lie if you have to._

He breathed hard, looked down, and shook his head.

“No." The unfamiliar texture was there in his voice again, raw and exposed. "But you've been.”

She wanted to cry.

“Just me?”

He swallowed.

“Just you.”

"Then couldn't—"

"No."

“But if we were to—”

“I said, _no_.”

She stared at him.

His face was both desperately sad and completely immovable.

She lifted her chin.

Alright.

If Percy Weasley wanted obedience, she'd give it to him.

“Yes, Sir.”

His shoulders fell.

“Will that be all, Mr. Secretary?”

He looked at her for a long time.

“I’m so sorry,” he said at last. “This has all been such a terrible mistake.”

She turned away.

Opening the door for Mr. Simmons, she gave him an emotionless smile, and waved him into Percy’s office.

Then she sat down at her desk, picked up her quill, and wrote a brief letter in her neatest penmanship.

She left it open in the middle of her desk.

Next, she wrote a single line in the center of a square of white parchment, and set it aside.

She tapped a blank square of parchment. It turned into a crow, popping about her desk on delicate feet. With no instructions, it behaved as an idle bird would do, picking up invisible crumbs in its beak and trying to admonish her with its silent calls.

Pushing it aside with a gentle hand, she began to organize her desktop.

She sorted her memos by priority.

She straightened her tower of white parchment squares.

She washed and carefully dried her quills and her ink pot.

Finally, she gathered any small bits of personal belongings into her handbag: a stray lipstick in a drawer; a picture of her posing politely between a smiling Ines and Kath; a pressed coral pink alstroemeria bloom; the brass desk plate with her name on it.

Then she pulled on her jacket, and put her bag over her shoulder.

She took a last look over her letter of resignation—effective immediately—tapped it with her wand, and sent it down to HR.

Then she reread her intraoffice note:

_I would have liked to have known you._

She tapped it, and watched as it folded itself into another tiny, soundless crow. It stared her down with its paper eye, hopped twice sideways, then lifted off of her desk, and flew through the window above Percy's door.

Pansy walked swiftly through the office, pausing only briefly by Ines and Kath at the front desk.

"Off early, love?" asked Kath, adjusting her glasses against her nose. "Still not feeling a hundred percent?"

"Not exactly," said Pansy. "I'll see you?"

Ines laughed. "Too right you will. We'll all be back at it again bright and early tomorrow morning."

Pansy smiled. "Mmm. Goodbye."

"Bye, love." Kath tapped a yellow square of parchment, and a little finch formed itself and flew off into the tangle of aeroplanes overhead. "Feel better."

Pansy took the rickety rear elevator down to the Atrium level, and caught the nearest Floo.

Stepping into her own front room, clean and quiet, she hung up her jacket, and opened up her handbag.

She drew out the little white paper crow she'd stashed inside, its belly blank, and set it down to hop about as it saw fit.

Without warning, as she shifted on her feet, her knickers slid damp against her skin, and she slammed her eyes closed.

She breathed in.

She breathed out.

Then slowly, she moved up the stairs on exhausted legs to draw herself a bath.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: potentially claustrophobic situation. Please see end note if this is a serious trigger for you.

“Oh, _fuck_ , that hurt.”

Pansy raised her hand reflexively to her chest.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Parkinson,” said the seamstress, pulling back on the pin she’d been rocking through the gathered silk chiffon at the base of Pansy’s sternum.

“It’s alright, I just wasn’t expecting it.” Pansy put her arm back down, and stood tall on the dais in front of a wall of tall mirrors as the seamstress continued to adjust the material of her dress.

The gown was tasteful; Pansy would concede that to Hermione. It had a fitted, sleeveless bodice made of an intricate series of tight pleats in impossibly fine sheer silk, with a V-shaped neckline plunging down to a gathered waist before the skirts opened up to trail in mythical layers down to the floor. She and Ginny had very different figures, but it managed to flatter them both, and although there was some debate as to whether the color was mauve or berry, they each somehow looked well in it in.

“It makes your tits look only small, Pans,” said Daphne. She was curled up on the deep bank of a comedically long sofa upholstered in tufted flax-colored velvet, with her shoes off and her knees tucked up underneath the skirt of a summer dress.

“My tits _are_ only small,” said Pansy, unperturbed.

“Does Hermione’s dress emphasize her bust?” asked Daphne. She sipped at the straw in her drink, then jiggled the cup to redistribute the ice. “That’s how I would do it: observe, guests, my small-titted friends, and compare them to the lush display you see here before you, now entering into wedlock with this very tall man.”

“That’s because Blaise is one of history's great connoisseurs of the breast. I suspect Hermione could change hers out with official copies of her N.E.W.T. scores and Draco wouldn’t be terribly bothered. But I suppose the dress does show her decolletage to best advantage, now that I'm forced to think about it.” Pansy shrugged.

“As well it should,” nodded Daphne.

“Is it normal for your nipples to try and make an escape, or am I supposed to sort of go over the breasts, and tug it right between, like this?” asked Ginny from the other end of the sofa, pulling the fabric of her dress- identical to Pansy’s- from both sides until it met over her sternum.

“Somewhere between full coverage and nipple display, I think,” offered Daphne. “You want that little bit of the side of the breast, for sexual enticement.” She watched as Ginny allowed the fabric to recover from the assault and find neutral ground. "Yes, like that, exactly. Now bang it in place with a sticking charm so you don’t flash, and you’re all set.”

The seamstress set her jaw and tried not to look at Ginny yanking away on her gown.

“I’m marrying Harry on a Quidditch pitch, in full gear,” said Ginny. “There’s absolutely no way I’m climbing into a white gown and standing up in front of everyone like an over-frosted cupcake.”

“I hadn’t realized you’d been engaged, Ginny. I suppose congratulations are in order?” asked Pansy.

“No, not yet,” said Ginny. “He keeps dropping hints, though. ‘Ginny, when do you think a couple’s been living together long enough to take the next step?’, 'What do you suppose is a good age to get married, Ginny?’, ‘Damn, Ginny, I've overdone the bacon, what would you say if I asked you to marry me?' I suppose he’ll be proposing before too long.”

“Potentially,” agreed Pansy.

“I’m going to marry this scone,” offered Theo. "Our relationship is highly sexually charged." He sat between Ginny and Daphne, lounging so far down on the sofa that only his head could be considered as being not in complete repose. He put a smear of clotted cream on a lump of raspberry scone, and held it out toward Daphne. “Have a bite.”

“No, thank you, I’ve had that pan au chocolate only half an hour ago, I’d burst.”

“Give it here,” said Ginny, rolling over onto her side toward Theo and taking the lump from his fingers.

“Watch the dress,” warned Pansy, turning left at a gentle nudge from the seamstress.

“Merlin, you don't half eat fast,” said Theo, knitting his brow in concern as he watched Ginny lick the cream from her fingertips.

“Mm. You grow up in a household with six older brothers, and then tell me how long you’re accustomed to food being left available.” Ginny brushed a hand across her abdomen, clearing a crumb.

“ _Carpe_...what’s scone in Latin?” asked Theo.

“Sconum?” offered Daphne.

“That’s exactly right,” said Ginny. “You've got to seize what you want. Did that come from Plimshaw’s?”

Theo nodded sagely. “They’re extraordinary. Pans, we're contracting with them for the party business, aren't we?"

Pansy nodded.

"Excellent. Do you think you’ll ever marry Blaise, Daph?” asked Theo.

Daphne leaned her head against the palm of her hand and shrugged.

“I suppose. He’d give me very beautiful children, which can’t be discounted.”

"A valid priority," agreed Theo.

"I probably ought to send Harry to speak with Mum about the ring before too long," said Ginny.

“Oh!” Daphne trilled. “There’s a family ring, then? That can be so lovely.”

"There's a whole trove of inherited ones Mum's rather morbidly kept for each of us,” said Ginny, “although I think Percy's gone and snatched up the best of the lot for whoever it is he's planning to ask."

Pansy felt as though her blood chilled and then stopped moving.

"Percy?" asked Theo. He looked pointedly at Ginny.

"Mmm hmm." Ginny nodded.

"Your brother. The bureaucrat."

"That's the one."

"He's getting married?" asked Theo again.

"I suppose he must be.”

“But you’re not sure?”

Ginny looked sideways at Theo. “No, actually. About three weeks ago, after Sunday dinner, he apparently asked Mum whether he might have Great Grandmother Weasley's ring sometime in the near future. It's by far the best one, but he's welcome to it; it's really not my style at all. We'll likely just wear bands, but it's one of the few things that was held onto from the Weasley line's distant rich arsehole past. No offense to any of the three of you." She looked at Daphne, who shrugged amiably. "The diamond's enormous."

"That's very interesting," said Theo. "Any idea who the lucky recipient might be?"

“Not a clue. How about you, Pansy?” asked Ginny. “Anything on the horizon? I've been meaning to ask if you're bringing someone to the wedding.”

Pansy stared hard at the wall on the other side of the room and said nothing.

“Pansy doesn’t do serious,” said Theo, shoving the last bite of scone into his mouth. "Although up until recently she had been fucking Percy."

Absolutely everyone looked at Theo.

"What?" asked Theo.

"I really do wonder about you, darling," said Daphne. "You need to stop spending so much time with Paul, he's a terrible influence."

Ginny shook her head.

"Pansy?" she repeated. "You've been sleeping with Percy?" she asked, looking at Pansy as though she'd completely lost the plot. "I don't understand. I thought you'd been working under him."

Theo choked.

"There's nothing to understand, is there Theo. You git." Daphne sat up and frowned. "Everyone agreed not to say anything."

"Everyone?" shouted Pansy. Even to her own ear, she sounded nearly hysterical. "Who the fuck is 'everyone'?"

"Oh, don't fuss over it, Pans, no one cares," said Theo.

"I do care somewhat," said Ginny.

"Who the fuck said I was sleeping with Percy anyway?" Pansy practically shouted. "Ow! Fuck!"

"Sorry," said the seamstress from her place at Pansy's hem. "If you could try to hold still, please…"

Daphne looked at Pansy sympathetically, like she was a child crying over a skinned knee.

"I'm so sorry, Pans, it wasn't not obvious."

Pansy clenched her fists so hard it hurt.

"It was the way you said his name, is what it was," said Theo.

"And the frequency," added Daphne.

"You can go to hell and fuck right off," gritted Pansy. "Both of you."

"It even works when someone else says it. Watch, Ginny. _Percy Weasley_." He looked over the rim of his spectacles at her. "See? Red at the ears, straight away."

Pansy could have murdered him in fifteen different ways, posed in victory over his corpse, and gone to her own grave at peace with herself at the end of a long life.

"So you're who he's been seeing?" asked Ginny. "That's interesting."

"I was never _seeing_ him," said Pansy.

"I'm sorry, I'm still not understanding," said Ginny. "Are you suggesting that you've had casual sex with Percy?"

Daphne tilted her head. "You did convince him to go to bed with you, didn't you? With the..." Daphne lowered her chin, batted her eyes, and pushed out her bust.

"She had to convince him?" asked Theo. "That's unusual. Pansy's not rough to look at."

Ginny snorted.

"Not that I'd like to continue this line of inquiry, but have you actually met my brother?" she asked.

Daphne turned to Ginny.

"Oh, don't undersell him, he's lovely. I've seen him once or twice since we left school, and he's every bit as good looking as Pansy tried not to make him out to be."

"I'm not talking about that, I'm sure he's perfectly attractive if you're not related to him. I mean that he's so blasted serious about absolutely everything. His typical pace in relationships could be handily beaten by a glacier with nowhere to be on a Sunday morning."

"That must have presented quite a challenge for you then, Pans. Do you often even let them make it past the threshold before you've got their trousers off?" said Theo.

"Theodore, why the fuck are you even here?" Pansy barked at him.

"I've been made to try on the wedding suit, haven't I?" He opened his arms and gestured at his black and dove grey three piece morning suit. "And you told me they offered scones, of course I was going to show," he said woundedly.

"Well you oughtn't to have done." She couldn't stop herself from turning to Ginny. "I suppose he's speeding things right up for someone exceptional, then," she said hotly. "If he's asking after a ring already."

Ginny frowned. "I suppose so. That's very unlike Percy, though. He must have a reason to move quickly."

"Oh!" Daphne sat up eagerly. "Maybe she's…"

For a moment, Pansy's vision went blank and white hot.

Daphne and that _fucking_ Russian novel.

Ginny's eyes grew wide.

"That’s less likely than anything. I suppose he has to have been seeing her for a while." She looked at Pansy remorsefully. "He might have started back up with that solicitor, Madeline. She was obviously angling for more from the relationship before they split, but it took him a full year just to introduce her to Dad at the Ministry. They never got anywhere near even moving in, let alone an engagement. He's just so breathtakingly particular about everything."

Before Ginny had finished the thought, Pansy was off the dais.

The seamstress was crouched on her knees, in the midst of placing a pin at the hem of the dress, and as Pansy stepped down, she had to tug at the skirt to bring it with her, causing the seamstress to hitch forward and catch herself with one hand before she fell down.

“Miss Parkinson, I wasn’t finished,” she called out, but Pansy was already headed in the direction of the hallway leading to the front of the shop.

“Where are you going, Pans?” said Daphne, sitting up and twisting around to watch Pansy go.

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. If I’m not,” said Pansy, turning on her heel, “whatever happens is your fault, Theo. That was the absolute last scone you’ll ever hear about from me.”

Theo frowned. “Is this about what Daphne said about your tits? Apologize to Pansy, Daphne.”

The last they heard of Pansy was her fumbling with the box of Floo powder over the fireplace mantle in the front of the shop, then her muted shout.

“This has _fuck all_ to do with my tits!” 

Pansy barged through the Ministry Floo, grasping handfuls of chiffon and hoisting them up slightly to avoid tripping over her half-pinned hem.

She entered a lift, nodding to a witch she vaguely recognized as being from Magical Transportation, and shoved her finger hard at the button for Level 2.

Spit out into the hallway, she clicked along on a pair of flimsy, strappy gold heels, and hauled open the door to the Ministry for Justice.

Ines looked up as Pansy entered, and broke into a broad smile. “Hello, love! This is a welcome surprise."

“Is Secretary Weasley in?” asked Pansy, pausing at the front desk.

Kath rounded the corner from the kitchenette, sipping from a cup of tea.

“Merlin, Pansy! What a treat this is! Popping round for a visit?”

“Hello, Kath. I suppose so, yes. I was just asking Ines if Secretary Weasley is still in this office. And if he's in.”

"Of course he's still in this office, and as far as I know he's in,” said Kath. “Would you like to send him a note, letting him know you’re here?”

“No, actually, I’ll just head back.”

“Check in with his secretary,” called Ines. “I’m sure you'll be able to squeeze in. That gown is beautiful!”

Pansy’s stomach fluttered at the thought of Percy’s new secretary, but she marched around the left side of the room without stopping, until she arrived at her former desk.

There was a young man sitting there.

He had light brown hair and pale skin, and looked to be about two heights too tall and two widths too narrow for his navy blue wool suit.

The name plate in front of his desk read:

_Robert Archer, Secretary_

“Hello, Miss. Can I help you?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” said Pansy, and she walked to Percy’s door and hauled it open.

She might have prepared herself to see him again, had she not been driven by the searing hot rage roaring through her belly, but she was, and she hadn’t, and for a moment she stopped in the doorway and was only able to stare.

It had only been three weeks, but they might as well have stretched out into months.

He was as impeccable as always, wearing his charcoal grey three piece tweed suit with a white shirt and black tie. His hair was combed and tidy, and behind him, the window looked out onto a day of startling beauty, sun-streaked layers of living green lifting and falling under the invisible hand of a breeze. 

He looked up when she entered, and for a moment she forgot all about the anger that had driven her there, and instead, felt the deep, anxious pull of want tugging hard at her belly.

His desk was in its usual state of tight organization, but the image came to her of a flock of parchment rising into the air and arcing out in suspended disarray before falling to the floor.

She recalled an overturned pot, and black ink seeping across a grey carpet.

Hands pulling her knickers down so hard she later found a tear at the seam.

_I never want you more_

_than I want you like this._

The last time she’d been in this room, he’d come inside her.

His eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles were the same clear, warm blue as they'd always been. For the briefest second, they flickered with confusion, and then settled into an unreadable calm.

“Pansy!”

Pansy jolted at the sound, and finally took in the rest of the room.

Jonathan Gable sat in an easy posture in one of the chairs in front of Percy’s desk.

“What a delightful surprise!” he said, sitting up taller and turning his body toward her. His smile was as natural and easy as ever. “Were you expecting her, Weasley?”

Percy stared at Pansy. “No. I wasn’t expecting her.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Weasley,” said Robert Archer, Secretary, from behind Pansy’s shoulder. “I would have told her to wait, but she just walked right in.”

“That’s alright, we were just finishing up our meeting,” said Jonathan.

Robert looked to Percy.

Percy looked between Pansy, Jonathan, and Robert.

“Thank you, Mr. Archer, I appreciate your efforts,” he said. “Please pull the door to, we’ll let you know if we’re in need of anything further.”

Robert shifted his gaze uncertainly between the three of them, then did as he’d been asked.

When the door clicked, Percy gestured at the empty chair next to Jonathan. “Please, have a seat, Miss Parkinson.”

“No. I won’t need to have a seat.”

“What are you wearing, Pansy?” asked Jonathan. “That dress is extraordinary.”

Pansy tore her attention away from Percy’s immobile face, and turned to Jonathan.

“It’s a bridesmaid's dress. I’ve just been at a fitting. With your sister, Mr. Secretary,” she said to Percy. “You may have been aware.”

Percy did and said nothing.

“Oh! Well, it’s absolutely beautiful. You look stunning,” said Jonathan.

“We were talking, naturally, about marriage,” said Pansy. “And came round to the subject of family rings.”

She was now focused entirely on Percy, and as she spoke, she watched his eyes momentarily grow wide, and as the color drained from his face, he took on the unmistakable pallor of someone who’s been caught out.

Pansy’s anger had dropped down to embers when she walked in, but with that look on his face, it came roaring back as a conflagration, eating up everything in its path.

“Ask me what this was to me,” she said.

Percy glanced at Jonathan.

“Mr. Gable, could you please excuse me and Miss Parkinson…”

“No, Jonathan, don’t go. I won’t be long,” she said. “There’s no call for Secretary Weasley and me to be alone together.” She repeated her demand to Percy. “Ask me.”

Percy leaned forward slightly in his desk chair.

“What was this to you?” he asked quietly.

“It was everything,” she said.

With a swift gesture and a muttered spell, Percy silenced the room.

“Jonathan, I need to ask you to…” started Percy.

“No! No. I’m almost finished,” said Pansy. “I won’t trouble you, ever again, in just a moment.”

Jonathan looked between them, and sat perched on the edge of his chair like he was ready to bolt at the sound of the starting gun.

“Were you seeing her all along? Or did you decide the right time to start was when you were having me come for you just after your 10 o'clock meetings?”

Percy's brow twitched, but he remained still and cool, and didn't answer.

“Perhaps she was your prior engagement in the evening once you'd finished fucking me until I couldn’t string two words together,” Pansy continued. “Things must have gone awfully well for you, to have asked after the ring that same weekend.”

Jonathan sat back in his chair. “Ohhhh.” He steepled his fingers in front of his mouth and looked between Percy and Pansy with his eyebrows raised.

“Answer the question, _Sir_ ,” Pansy insisted. “Were you seeing someone else while you were having your bit of fun with me?”

There was at last a flush of hot pink climbing up Percy’s skin from underneath his collar.

“I wasn’t seeing anyone while I was seeing you,” he said.

Pansy tightened her fists so hard her knuckles turned white, and took a step toward his desk.

“You were not _seeing_ me. Don’t you dare say that. You made it perfectly clear on the day that I resigned from this job that this was a tawdry fuck- one that made you hate yourself, at that- that you needed to stop having so you could find yourself a suitable wife, preferably one who doesn’t give you what you actually want so you don’t have to feel guilty about it.”

Percy sat forward in his chair and put his hands on his desk like he was about to stand.

“I probably ought to…” said Jonathan, moving from his chair.

“Stay, Jonathan, I’m nearly finished,” ordered Pansy.

Jonathan froze in place half in and half out of his chair.

“Did you think that this was uncomplicated for me?” she asked Percy. “Did you honestly think that?”

Percy stared at her, then finally nodded. “I did.”

“Well it wasn’t!” Pansy took the last few steps to his desk, and picked up a parchment square from its stack at the corner. She crushed it into what amounted to a minuscule ball, and threw it down in the middle of his desk. It bounced once, then landed flatly. "That's what I think of your perfect desk."

He didn't move. 

“How could you not understand that I gave you absolutely everything you allowed me to?” She picked up a second slip of parchment, crushed it down, then threw it onto his desk. “And that's what I think of your white parchment. You monumental _cock_!”

Jonathan had dropped to the floor from his chair, and was slowly creeping on his hands and knees around the perimeter of the room towards the door.

“I’ve fucked a lot of men,” said Pansy. She heard Jonathan softly cough from the corner of the room. “I will never, ever apologize for that. But if you think that I would have done the things that I did for you, or let you do the things that you did to me, with another man, you’re dead wrong. I trusted you absolutely. And I respected you, more than any other man I’ve ever known.”

Percy was now pushing up slightly, and looked ready to jolt from his desk.

“And I realize that you didn’t think I was the sort of woman you could bring home to your mother, or the one that you wanted mothering your children." Here, her voice grew brittle and began to crack, and she paused, swallowing against the tightness in her throat. "I was the easy, frivolous girl you played your office games with"- Percy's jaw clenched visibly as she spoke -"and tossed around in your bed when the mood finally struck. I understand that. But when I was on my knees for you, I felt safe, Percy. You made me feel so fucking safe. Submitting to you in the ways that I did was the most intimate experience of my entire life. There isn’t a more careful man in the world. And I wanted nothing more than to be the subject of that care."

Percy stood.

“So marry this other woman. I hope she gives you what you need, whatever that is. But if you insist on believing that deep down you’re an awful man, don’t blame it on the fact that you wanted to tie me up, or take me over your knee to spank me, or come on my tits in front of poor Jonathan.”

“What?” said Jonathan from the floor by the door.

“The only awful thing that you did to me is choose to not consider that what we were doing together might have been important to me. If you’d asked, I might have told you that I was very much in love with you. But you didn’t. So I’ll tell you now: you broke my heart. Completely. More importantly, you broke my trust. There’s not enough yellow parchment in the world to tell you how that feels. If you're so desperate to feel ashamed of yourself, feel ashamed of that.”

She turned around sharply, and skirting Jonathan where he sat back on his heels by the door, pink in the face, she pulled Percy’s door open, and walked as rapidly as she could past the desk of Robert Archer, around the perimeter of the office, and toward the door to the hall.

Behind her, she heard a dull crashing sound, a yelp, and Percy’s voice.

“Fuck! So sorry, Gable.”

Pansy hiked up her hem, and rounded the corner of the front desk at a clip.

“Leaving already?” asked Kath, leaning against her elbows and blowing on the surface of her tea.

“Yes, sorry, I’ll Owl you. Kath, Ines.” Pansy nodded politely to the two women at the front desk. “We’ll have a tea soon, I promise.”

She hauled open the door to the Ministry for Justice, hooked an immediate left, and headed forward at a light jog, heels ticking metronomically against the polished surface of the floor.

She heard the door to the Ministry for Justice swing open behind her, and the muted click of a man’s leather shoes.

“Pansy, wait.”

She refused to look over her shoulder, and picked up her pace, leaning forward as she turned another left, and then a right, heading through the geometric sameness of the Ministry labyrinth toward the disused rear lift.

She passed by Mr. Simmons, emerging from the gents’, and nodded without letting it swallow up any of her lead. “Hello, nice to see you.”

“Pansy, stop,” said Percy.

“No!” she barked over her shoulder.

“Damn it, would you just please stop,” he said again, this time closer. “I don’t want to have to run after you, but I’ll do it.”

She picked up into a slow run herself.

“Pansy, stop right now,” he ordered.

“No!” she said. “You are not allowed to tell me what to do!”

“I swear to the gods, I will haul you back to my office over my shoulder, is that what you want?”

Pansy pulled her wand from the pocket in the side seam of her dress, and threw a Stinging Jinx over her left shoulder.

“Ow, fuck!” shouted Percy. “What the fuck!”

Pansy sighted the lift ten meters ahead, pulled up her skirts, and outright ran to it.

It was, blessedly, hanging open, and as she crossed the threshold, she turned and jammed her index finger hard and repetitively into the button for Level 6. She would pull a feint, and jump out at another floor, dash over to the main lifts, and hopefully lose him on the way to the Floos in the Atrium.

She looked up at him, then, and he was well and truly running down the hallway, though impeded by a limp and slightly favoring his right leg.

“Pansy! Stop, damn it, do not shut that door,” he commanded. “I’ll only catch you up in the Atrium, you know it.”

She lifted her chin triumphantly as the dim metal surfaces of the doors began to draw together in front of her.

He pulled out his wand, then- seeming to think better of it- reached out his opposite hand, and was nearly close enough to jam it between the doors when they pressed closed with a quiet, satisfying note of finality.

Pansy waited for the start of the descent.

And waited.

And...

Waited so long that it became awkward.

The lift creaked moodily.

She jammed at the button for Level 6 again, still back-lit by an uneven, sallow ring of magical light.

The lift remained unbothered.

“I’m making an escape here,” she told the air. “This is undignified. It suits neither of us.”

Absolute silence.

“You’re going to be bloody-minded about it, then?” she asked. “Alright.”

She pressed irritably at each of the buttons on the panel, save Level 2, until they were all lit up, and then waited.

The lift remained stubbornly stagnant.

“Honestly, this is how you’re going to play this out?” She looked at the row of buttons below the floors.

Her options were:

_Open Door_

_Close Door_

A button embossed with a picture of a bell.

A plain, aggressively red button with no label.

And one wearing a symbol of what looked, ominously, like an ax.

She pressed the _Open Door_ button.

Then pressed it again.

The lift exuded a meditative stillness.

“Gods. _Humiliating_.”

She pushed the single bright red button.

By way of an opening gesture, the lights in the lift flickered, then went out.

Next, there was a low, mechanical groan, during which the lift car seemed to rise as much as a foot or two, and then after a pregnant pause of perhaps thirty seconds, dropped.

There was a moment, which in objective terms lasted roughly the duration of a sneeze, and perceptually as long as a scalding hot shower on a frosty Monday morning in January, where Pansy was aware of her impending death.

While the drop was brief, Pansy experienced it from the wrong side of a lightless metal box, not as unlike a coffin or tomb as she would have preferred.

It took its short, interminable fall, then with a high, shrill, metallic protest, the car hit some unknown barrier to seven floors of free fall, and jounced roughly as it came to rest.

Pansy, hands splayed flat against the cold metal of the interior walls, breathed slowly, ordering her pulse to fall back into line.

After a long interlude, punctuated by nothing more than a soft, tinny sort of whine from the lift shaft, Pansy pulled her wand out of her pocket.

“ _Lumos._ ”

Nothing had changed in the interior of the lift, except for the lack of light.

“Theodore Nott,” Pansy began. “You absolute _fucking_ muppet. You can take your raspberry scones and shove them right up your narrow, petulant-”

It was just then that she heard, very distantly, the sound of shouting.

People often forgot that Pansy had been a Prefect.

Her grades at school hadn’t been anything to sneeze at, but she had, admittedly, studied less than she might have done, in favor of other, more gratifying activities in the Slytherin dormitory. And in the first-floor corridor. And one particular corner of the library, next to the bust of the cranky-looking wizard with the extravagant eyebrows.

Trapped inside a metal box dangling over roughly fifty meters of open space, with nothing better to do, she recognized that she was woefully out of practice with charms to either help or entertain herself.

She set the glowing face of a magical clock into the surface of the door in front of her, and then vanished it when she realized she'd counted off seven minutes that felt like at least an hour.

Within the first minutes of her entrapment, Pansy had cast an _Aguamenti_ , only to ensure that she could, and wrinkled her nose at the flaccid taste of the resulting airborne squiggle of water as she caught it in her mouth.

She conjured a drinking flask, filled it, then tested out a series of spells which ensured she could pee in a sanitary fashion if she had to, and made a mental note to limit the amount of stale water she indulged in.

For a while, she considered whether a levitation spell could be worked on herself, the lift car, or both, in the event that it started to fall in earnest, but when she determined that if that happened, she would instinctively attempt it whether it was likely to work or not, she set it aside as a pointless thought experiment.

She tried for a long while to amplify the various sounds she could hear beyond the walls of her tomb, but when nothing from her sturdy mental library of eavesdropping charms did any good, she suspected part of what was keeping her in- and perhaps even keeping her _up_ \- was some kind of magical barrier. The noises were more attenuated than they ought to have been, even given the thickness of the double metal doors of the lift and the surrounding Ministry walls. There were low, rhythmic mutterings, most likely voices, as well as ongoing metallic tinkering noises. Once she heard what was probably, from outside, a massive bang, followed by an entire chorus of shouts.

Her legs eventually grew tired, and quickly forming then dismissing the dreaded clock, she saw that it was now well into evening.

She was incredibly fucking hungry.

She cursed Gamp’s Law, sat down with her delicate skirts pulled underneath her, and used her wand to draw pictures in rainbow hued light in the air in front of her.

A unicorn.

A croissant.

A bowl of soup.

The word _Theo_ , which she crossed out with a large X, and then an enormous shark, which she animated to swim along and eat the punished word.

She tried, and failed, to not think of Percy.

He had been out there, surely, waiting for her at some junction of the lift, and she wondered when he realized it wasn’t going to open.

She imagined him briskly walking to Maintenance, giving them the information they needed to mount a rescue, then coolly returning to his office, smoothed and polished, and by then, no longer limping.

He would, she supposed, finish his work day, and then…

Would he see her, that evening?

Would he tell her? About the girl in his office, in the bridesmaid’s gown, pouring her heart out for no reason at all beyond an attempt to make him understand the gravity of what he'd been, once, to a woman who fetched him his tea?

Her skin burned with the shame of it, and she spent a solid seven minutes to an hour rifling through her mental catalog of cities she could live in for the next ten to twenty years that Percy and his wife were unlikely to ever visit.

At 11 o’clock, she cast a warming charm, conjured an irritatingly lumpy pillow, then put her head down, and fell asleep.

In the permanent dark, there is no such thing as morning, and Pansy spent a frustrating night looking at her clock, only to find it was nowhere near time to be awake.

The sounds outside seemed to have continued, or at least stopped after she slept, and picked right back up in the morning, though they were no more clear than they had been the previous day.

She drank a limited amount of water, did things she would never in the rest of her life admit to that involved the Vanishing Spell and very carefully holding up her skirts, and made valiant attempts to approximate her morning cleaning rituals, until she felt fairly confident that she could meet either her end or her salvation as inoffensively as possible.

The dress, unfortunately, was adjusting to the situation rather poorly.

She’d been jabbed with at least four pins, which she pulled out and angrily Vanished, and she’d located one actual tear in the delicate fabric of the skirt.

Despite having been slept in, the border of the low neckline remained at an appropriate middle distance between her nipples and her sternum, which boded well for dancing well into the wee hours at the wedding.

If she made it there.

She spent the entirety of her second day in the lift running through ideas to enact her escape, or enable her rescue.

She compiled a list of things she knew how to conjure, none of which seemed likely to do anything more than make her slightly more comfortable, or trap a host of snakes, butterflies, or voles in the lift with her, none of which seemed ideal.

Spells to push, pull, explode, cut, or pry the elevator doors open she all deemed too risky from the inside, and she was loathe to try anything at all without more information about whatever magical elements were involved.

There was a hatch in the roof of the lift, but she couldn't recall a spell for conjuring a step ladder, and standing on a tower of voles seemed unlikely to be fruitful. In any case, she suspected the hatch was blocked by whatever was hemming in the rest of the lift.

Frustrated and out of ideas, she conjured an enormous pillow, sat on it, and began singing through the litany of Hogwarts songs she'd declined to participate in while still at school.

Once she was finished with all the ones she could remember, she made up her own song, which she entitled Not Nott, and filed it away for a future intimate performance for an audience of one. It was punctuated at the chorus by a repeated and very crude gesture made with her first two fingers held up in a V.

She napped, briefly, around 3 o’clock, but kept it short by charming her wand to chime at her after half an hour, and was in the midst of reconsidering how she might make a serious go at the hatch in the roof, when there was an extraordinary uptick in the amount of noise coming from outside the lift.

She moved into the far corner of the car, watched the doors, and waited.

After a long period where the noise kept up- voices, surely, elevated and urgent, but also a deep, reverberating metal-on-metal sound like a very large hammer hitting a colossal nail- there was a low grinding noise, and the doors to the lift began to crack open.

The minuscule sliver of light that appeared was only along roughly the top ten centimeters of the door, while the lower half opened slightly into darkness.

As the crack widened, she heard voices clearly for the first time. There were at least three.

“Hold on to the other side. Like that. Alright, now pull. Hard.”

“Fuck!”

“You alright?”

“I’m fine, keep going.”

“Are you sure this is…”

“I’m fucking sure, just pull. It’s giving, look!”

The doors came apart enough that she might have pushed one of her fine-boned hands through the space between them. There was a long metal bar wrenched between the two sides, being worked with tremendous force.

“That’s it, jam the stop in there. Do it now...now! Before we lose the opening!”

What looked like a brick of metal slid into the opening between the doors. A crackle of green light arced off of it, and there was a groan from the elevator.

Around the brick, the green light continued to slip and spark, and Pansy watched and listened while the doors protested and tried to shut again. The brick shifted very slightly, held, then gradually stopped lighting up.

There was now a space of a few centimeters at the top of the lift doors that was open to the outside world.

“Is she in there? Is she alright?”

“Keep your fucking trousers on, I’m looking right now.”

A shadow moved across the little window at the top of the door, and then a bright beam of light pushed into her face.

“Get that light out of my fucking face!” Pansy shouted.

“Yeah, she’s in there.”

The light dropped away, and as Pansy adjusted her vision, she could make out a face pressed down to the floor, and a clear grey eye peering in at her.

“Alright, Pans?” asked Draco.

“You mean apart from being trapped in a fucking lift? I’m doing swimmingly.”

Draco turned his head and spoke to whoever else was in the room with him.

“She’s definitely fine. She doesn’t look great, but I wonder if we might be able to get some food through, if it could be slipped along the edge of the brick.”

“Ask her if she’s been drinking water.”

“Have you been drinking water, Pans?” asked Draco.

“Of course I have. And I refuse to speak about it any further.”

“She says she has. Can you all hear her, or do I need to keep repeating what she’s saying?”

“Can I get down there and go over some of this with her?” asked a voice Pansy didn’t recognize.

“Sure. Bill’s going to talk to you for a moment, Pans,” said Draco. “Chin up, alright? How’s the dress? Hermione told me not to ask, but I’m asking.”

“It’s seen better days, Draco. I’m not going to lie. But it’s repairable.”

“No worries. There’s plenty of time. Just try not to pee on it.”

“The _fuck_ , Draco!” she shouted.

Draco’s face lifted away from the gap, and was replaced by the shadow of someone with ginger hair and a face not wholly unlike Percy’s.

“Hello there, Pansy. I’m Bill Weasley. I'm a Curse Breaker with Gringotts, but I'm here to help work on what's going on with this lift. You doing alright?”

“Don’t ask her things more than once if you don’t want to get your nose taken off,” she heard Draco suggest.

“Fair enough. This lift appears to have been cursed,” said Bill.

Too fucking right it was.

“We had to completely dismantle the outer doors, without magic, taking apart some of the wall,” he continued, “They were involved in whatever this spell is, and they put up quite a fight. Unfortunately, we weren’t sure where the lift car was in the shaft, and as it turns out, you're stopped between two floors."

That explained the weird location of the gap.

"We’re now planning to come in through the hatch at the top, but the big barrier is this bizarre magical field. I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like it. We’ve successfully put an iron brick in place to hold the door to the car open mechanically, as well as to make a space in the magical field so that people can communicate with you, but the barrier is still very much intact. We've only been able to push through it with pure iron. There’s probably not enough of a gap to send food through, but we’re working as fast as we can.”

Pansy sighed.

“It’s lovely to meet you,” he added. “Although I hope to be reintroduced soon under better circumstances.”

“Likewise,” said Pansy flatly.

"We’re going to be in and out, at this juncture, working on whatever’s going on here magically," he said. "Going off my best guess as to the nature of the curse, I don’t foresee it taking more than another day, maybe two. You’ll be hungry, but you have water, and…”

“Let me speak to her for a moment,” said Draco.

Bill moved away, and Draco returned.

He carefully slid a folded piece of paper across the surface of the iron brick, and while the green light emerged again to crackle around it, the paper fell through into the lift car.

“Hermione’s sent some spells she thought you might find useful while you wait. Bedding, bathing, entertainment, peeing, that sort of thing.”  
“The peeing is _just fine_ ,” Pansy gritted out. “I’m not an idiot.”

She picked up the paper, unfolded it, and read it to herself.

She lifted an eyebrow.

She’d had absolutely no reason in her life prior to now to conjure a blanket, or a book, both of which she found she would quite like to have, and Hermione had put both at the top of the list. Some others, like listening to Muggle radio stations with her wand, were weird, but potentially game changing under current conditions.

“Tell her thank you,” she said. “Sincerely.”

“I will,” said Draco. “Can I tell her that you like her now?”

Pansy grimaced.

“If you absolutely must.”

“I think I must. Cheer up, Pans. Everyone out here is working as hard as they can. Some more than others.”

Pansy narrowed her eyes at him.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. I’ll see about sending some licorice whips or something across the gap.”

With her new window into the outer world, Pansy soon found herself wishing for a return of her dark cocoon.

She was obliged to accept visitors with an irritating frequency.

“I brought you some snacks, my snappy captive,” said Tracey late on the second evening.

She slid a thin licorice whip slowly over the brick. "It was either this, or rolling peas over."

“Thank you,” said Pansy.

“Anything for you, my love. We all just want you to be happy."

"Mmm," nodded Pansy.

"And you will be."

"I will be what?"

"Happy."

Pansy shrugged.

"Theo says he's very sorry," said Tracey. "I think he's not used to you actually caring about things."

"I don't care about things."

Tracey briefly glanced up.

"Well. As you like it. I'll leave some licorice for later."

She heard the men working on the curse coming and going throughout the night.

They spoke to one another, cast exploratory spells, opened books, and slammed them shut again in frustration.

Upon waking on the beginning of her third day, she acknowledged a better night’s sleep thanks to the creature comforts conjured up with Hermione’s intelligently curated list of spells.

Hermione herself showed up late in the morning, looking soft and affectionate, which Pansy figured was down to the fact that she was trapped inside a curse, inside a metal box, inside a lift shaft, and Hermione wasn’t.

“I’ve made you a list of books that I think you’ll enjoy, based on what Draco’s told me about your tastes.” She looked up and watched as one of the Curse Breakers stepped around her. “It sounds as though they’re getting close to being ready to make a serious attempt at getting you out, but I know I’d feel better with a stack of literature beside me.”

Pansy rolled her eyes.

“Of course you would. Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry that I ran off with the dress.”

“It’s entirely understandable.”

“What’s understandable?” asked Pansy.

Hermione shrugged.

“Life, and its beautiful complications. I’m very happy to have you in the wedding. Feel free to bring absolutely anyone you’d like.”

Pansy sighed irritably. She’d politely and firmly declined the plus one.

“Alright,” she said. “I’ll let you know if someone turns up at the last moment.”

By evening, she’d read through one and a half of the books on Hermione’s list, and determined to be, in the future, as nice as she was capable of being to Draco’s clever, fierce, and obnoxiously good-hearted wife.

She was considering reconjuring her bedding for another night when an enthusiastic Bill dropped down to the floor and peered into her window.

“We’re about to make an attempt at the magical field itself, Pansy. I just wanted to go over a few points with you.”

Pansy nodded. “Alright.”

“As far as we’ve been able to figure out, it’s not a curse. Did you use this lift often? While you worked here?”

“I did, actually. It was almost always empty.”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” said Bill to someone over his shoulder. He turned back to Pansy. “It appears that the lift was imminently ready to fail, and for lack of a better way to put it, it seems that it likes you.”

Pansy stared at him.

“I don’t mean that in the sense of actual sentience, but it's a complex piece of machinery in a very magical building, and as such, it operates on a level we can’t entirely understand or predict. It seems that when you expressed a state of emergency, correctly, as it turns out, it sort of recognized your magical signature, and went to the effort of generating a protective field. It’s been holding the lift car up this entire time.”

“So the elevator saved my life,” Pansy said expressionlessly, “because I actually bothered to use it.”

“Absolutely. Only now, it doesn’t want to stop doing that. So we’ve put an enormous amount of effort into spells to make sure the car doesn’t fall once the protection spell is dropped, and then we just need to, kind of, magically nudge the elevator into standing down.”

Pansy let out an exhausted breath.

“We’re going to go in five minutes. There will be a bit of a drop, not too much, so maybe hold onto a rail if you have one in there.”

“Alright,” said Pansy.

Bill moved away, and Pansy took a moment to fuss at her hair and neaten herself up as much as possible, then grab the hand rail.

She heard them outside, casting a series of incantations, closed her eyes, and waited.

“You can let go, you great daft thing. They’ve sorted it,” she said quietly into the air.

There was a fizzing hiss and a series of arcing green lights moved across the surface of the interior of the car, then she heard a low-pitched mechanical rumble. With a lurch, the lift car dropped enough that her window to the outside fell away, and she was in complete darkness again.

There was shouting, and a strong jolt hit the car, as though something had landed on it, followed by a flurry of noise directly above, several tinny bangs, then the hatch in the ceiling groaned open.

Pansy winced at the amount of light that poured in through the opening.

There were more thumps, and voices talking over one another, and then, feet first, Percy Weasley dropped down into the lift car.

He was in the same charcoal grey tweed trousers and vest he’d had on the day she walked into the lift, with no jacket, and no tie. The top button of his white shirt was undone and his sleeves were rolled up past his elbows.

His hair was loose and disheveled, and he had a three-day beard.

“Hello,” he said quietly.

Pansy found she couldn't speak at all.

He cast a levitation charm, and a cup of tea balanced on a saucer floated down into his hand.

“Here,” he said. “Start with this, and we have food for you once we’ve pulled you out.”

Pansy took the cup from him gratefully, and noticed that her hand shook as she lifted the cup to her mouth.

The tea was black, with a twist of lemon, not too hot.

“You know how I take my tea,” she said.

He looked at her. “Of course I do.”

He didn't say anything to her while she finished her cup, and once she was done, he took it from her, and set it on the floor of the lift.

There were people waiting up above- Pansy could hear their voices- but no one called down to ask how they were doing, or to hurry them along.

“We ought to go up, I suppose,” she said. “Don’t want to keep everyone waiting.”

Percy nodded, and dropped his head.

Neither of them moved.

“You haven’t shaved,” she said quietly.

“No.”

“Why haven’t you shaved?”

He slowly pushed his fingers over the field of stubble covering his jaw.

“I haven’t been home,” he said.

Pansy looked confused.

“Haven’t been home since when?”

He looked up at her, and the corner of his mouth pulled up slightly, then dropped.

“Never mind. Let’s get you through and Draco can take you home.”

Pansy shook her head.

“No, not ‘never mind’,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

Percy breathed out.

“I haven’t left the Ministry since you stepped into this lift. Alright?” He looked at the ceiling. The floor. At the wall over her shoulder.

“Has everyone else been here without stopping?” Pansy was overtaken with a profound sense of embarrassment at the thought of three men working around the clock to get her and her bridesmaid’s dress out of a lift that didn’t want to let her go.

Percy shook his head. “No. They’ve been taking it in shifts, although Bill and Draco have both been here almost as much as I have. But Jonathan, Dad, Theo…”

“What the _fuck_ is Theo doing here?”

Percy laughed lightly.

“He made it here first, Pansy. Very shortly after the lift had swallowed you up, actually. He said something about it having been more than fifteen minutes, and he wanted to see if you were alright. He was rather upset with me. I had my hand on my wand in my pocket, ready to defend myself for a moment there.”

Pansy twisted her hands around one another.

“I suppose I might consider unbanishing his name,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She looked carefully at Percy, who still wasn’t looking directly at her. “What did he say that he was upset with you about?”

Percy leveled his gaze on the floor.

“The same things that you are.”

He pushed his hands down into his pockets, and the corners of his mouth pulled down slightly.

“Did you really think,” he began, then paused. “Did you seriously believe for a moment that I would have run straight out and asked someone else to marry me, after all that?”

He finally lifted his eyes to her.

They were blue, and warm, and open.

“I don’t know what else I could have thought,” Pansy said. “Why would you have asked after a ring like that if you didn’t intend to ask someone?”

“I did intend to ask someone.”

Pansy’s pulse picked up.

“I don’t understand. If it wasn’t Madeline…”

“What?” Percy was incredulous.

“...or someone new, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” he agreed. “It really doesn’t. It was a mad impulse to ask after it. I certainly never meant for you to hear about it.”

Pansy was genuinely lost.

Percy stepped closer to her. “Pansy?”

‘What?”

He reached forward and took the slightest edge of the fabric of the skirt of her dress between his fingers.

“May I touch you? Please?” he asked.

She frowned.

“You hurt me,” she said.

“I know.”

He pulled gently at her skirt.

“I’m angry with you.”

“I know.”

She followed the pull of his fingers, and stepped closer to him.

“You can’t go around, getting engaged to other people like that.”

He shook his head.

When she was close enough, he brought his fingertips to her hips at either side, and slid them slowly around so that his hands held her firmly at the bottom of her waist.

“Ask me for what you want,” he said.

Pansy looked at him carefully.

“I want to touch you.”

He nodded.

She lifted her hands, and ran them through the back of his hair.

His eyes dropped closed.

She drew her fingers down, around the tops of his ears, to the stubble over his jaw, and traced the lines of him there, following the curve of his chin.

He looked at her again while her hands moved over him, trailing down over his throat, and falling to his chest. “I wanted to ask you, the day you walked into my office, if I could take you out with me," he said.

She said nothing. He was warm underneath her hands.

“But I was very nervous. I’m a reserved person, Pansy,” he said. “And I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you are more than a little bit intimidating.”

Pansy shrugged in concession.

“And then before I knew what had happened, I hadn’t asked you to go out with me, but I’d already been inside you.” His hands gripped her waist. “I genuinely did have a prior engagement the night after I took you to my bed, to have dinner with Bill’s family. And I felt, looking at him, as happy as he is with his wife, and his children, that if I asked you out, and you said yes”- he looked away from her, embarrassed- “as soon as I possibly could, I was going to ask you to marry me.”

Pansy’s eyes grew wide.

“It was mad, I know. I realized it straight away. I never imagined that you’d hear anything about it.”

Pansy dug her fingers into his shirt front, and pulled.

He stepped closer to her.

“But the more I thought about it, the less I could reconcile feeling that I loved you, and that I wanted to do all sorts of things to you that didn’t sound like love.” He frowned. “It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t.”

“I don’t think it needs to make sense. To anyone else, at least.”

“I've been on the wrong side of what's right before, Pansy.” His eyes found hers again, and held on. “I can’t stand the thought that I might harm you.”

Pansy pulled him in so that his hips met her belly, and he wrapped his arms around her waist.

“You won’t.”

“I want to be a good man.”

She pushed her fingers up through the back of his hair again.

“I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

“How are we going to do this, day in and day out?”

“We’ll figure it out.” She tilted her chin up to him. “Ask me for what you want.”

“I want to kiss you.”

“You may.”

He moved slowly this time, and his touch felt like an amends.

He took her lower lip between his. He licked, and he gently bit, and pushed into her mouth softly with his tongue, and as the tension built inside her and she felt him press insistently against her, she laughed when his fist gripped the back of her hair, hard, then quickly let go.

“It’s alright,” she whispered against his mouth. “You don’t need to hold back. The way you want it is good. It’s perfect.”

He groaned, and bunched the back of her dress in his fist.

Then he shouted.

“Ow, _shit!_ ” He pulled away, and watched as a bright red bead of blood formed on his palm.

“Oh, gods,” groaned Pansy. “I’m so sorry, the pins!”

When Draco finally got up the courage to shout down and ask whether they’d like a lift up, or to be left quite alone, they’d long been unable to kiss for laughing.

Full of the beautiful soup that Molly brought, and cleared as perfectly fine by a Ministry Healer, Percy Flooed Pansy home, and together, they wound slowly up the stairs.

They left her shoes on the bottom floor, then pulled carefully at her dress and discarded it at the first landing, along with his shoes, socks, and vest.

He left his shirt hung over the banister, but her knickers missed their mark, and flying over the edge, dropped all the way down the stairwell to the bottom floor.

His glasses were found later, hanging from the edge of a picture frame.

He pressed her against the wall in the hallway, dropped to his knees, and made her come hard and loud with his lips and tongue, before she pulled him into the bathroom by his belt buckle.

“May I touch you, please?” she asked, chin down, looking up at him. “Sir?”

He looked at her like he wanted to eat her.

“You may.”

So it was her hands that undid his buckle and his zip, hers that pushed his trousers and then his pants down over his hips, and hers that pulled at his cock while he impatiently tested the temperature of the shower.

He insisted they wash, first, which is how Pansy found herself trying to shampoo her hair with his long, elegant fingers pushed up inside her cunt, and his cock pressing at her back, but she managed.

He fucked her slowly, once they were clean, under the hot fall of water, with her back against the tiles and her ankles around his waist, and said nothing at all, because she refused to let his mouth leave hers.

She came- because he wanted her to- in the shower.

Then on her hands and knees in the middle of the bedroom floor.

In her bed, only partially dry, she ran her hands down the hard surface of his belly.

“You’re in _my_ bed,” she said, and raised an eyebrow.

She lasted longer than she thought he would let her, straddling his hips, slowly riding his cock, smoothing her hands over his chest, and ordering him to keep his hands to himself. She might have come like that, while he gripped a pillow over his face and groaned in frustration, but his patience was less than it could have been, and just as she felt herself begin to move faster and grip him hard inside her, he threw the pillow aside, sat up, and flipped them over so she was on her back.

He pushed her hands over her head and held her wrists down while he fucked her hard, mouthing at her throat, pulling at her ear with his teeth and lips, and pinching the peak of her nipple hard between his finger and thumb.

She let go, completely.

On her back, her belly, her side, she watched or felt him as he moved inside her.

The thought rose, unexpected and incongruous, of white paper squared to the edges of a desk. Precise letters in pure black ink across an unblemished page. A straightened tie. The deep green gloss of a leaf in the light from a window that told a story every day about love, and someone he had lost.

He cared infinitely for small things, for the details which only he could see, even in the damp of a ruined bed. While she panted and moaned underneath him, sweat slicked and only half-aware of the world beyond the edges of her own body, he attended to every shift and pulse, as though she was a puzzle he could sort through, make sense of, and put together again, and again, with practiced patience, every time she fell apart.

She started to come for the last time with both of her ankles held tightly in his hand, her hands twisted up into her own wet hair.

“Are you upset?” he asked, slowing down, then stopping.

She shook her head.

“Something’s wrong,” he insisted. 

“I’m just relieved,” she said. “That you won’t leave.”

He reached down and brushed his thumb over her cheek.

“No,” he said. “I won’t leave.”

He began again, and she came, grasping her fingers around his wrist at her hip, and after a handful of strokes, he bent down, and spilled into her while pressing his mouth against hers like it was the only thing in the world he could ever want.

After, wrapped in what could be recovered of the bed sheets, he let her touch him, wherever she wanted to, but she discovered that it made him anxious, and inclined to pin her hands where she couldn’t reach him.

He liked to be the one to touch.

She smiled against his mouth while she kissed him.

They were both exhausted, and so they dozed, and woke, and kissed, and slept again.

“Percy? Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

She ran her finger across the lines of a constellation she’d discovered on his shoulder. 

“You should ask me if I’d like to go out with you.”

She felt his chest jerk with a laugh under her cheek.

“It seems a bit late for that, doesn’t it?”

Pansy leaned up on her elbow, and looked intently into his face.

He took her hand in his, and slowly circled the back of her wrist with his thumb.

“You should ask me,” she repeated. “Ask me if I’ll go out with you.”

He stopped smiling.

The thumb at the back of her wrist stopped moving.

“Will you?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is an extended comedic sequence where Pansy becomes trapped in an elevator by herself for several days. She is very Pansy about the situation, and takes it in stride until she's rescued.


	6. Epilogue

6 Months Later

He ran the tip of his index finger up the column of her spine, and while he held it there, the hand with the rope moved.

Around her left shoulder, across her chest, to find itself again between her shoulder blades.

To the right, and around, again.

She was good, so good, and stayed still under his hands as they worked, calm, and precise, and so very patient, until his thumb brushed the edge of her breast, and she pulled in a breath hard enough for him to notice.

His hands stopped moving. “You’re getting worked up.”

She breathed out, pushing the air slowly through the O of her lips.

“Do we need to stop?” he asked.

“No, Sir.”

“Alright.” He moved again.

_Draw the breath, down to the belly, and sink._

_Go slow._

_Grow still._

He pulled the working end hard through a loop at her back, and the rope ran hot over her skin.

Behind her back, she flexed her wrists against their bindings, and gripped the soft skin of her forearms with her fingertips.

“You’ll remain calm, Miss Parkinson, or it stops.”

“Yes, Sir.”

_Sink, down, let go, and:_

_feel._

His thumb, against her skin, sliding beneath the band stacked across her chest.

The working end under her arm.

“Breathe, Miss Parkinson.”

The backs of his fingers, below her breasts.

The end of the rope, around her back.

_Breathe in._

A pause: cinch.

_Breathe out._

Over her shoulder, between her breasts.

His fingers, his rope.

His.

_Breathe._

Pulling the band between her breasts to the side.

And again, on the other.

_Breathe._

He took his time, each and every time, at the end, so that the ties that no one else would ever see would be beautiful.

She waited.

“Done.”

She listened, but couldn't see through the cloth, as he moved around to the front, to look at her.

“So fucking beautiful, on your knees, at the end of a bed.”

He moved around behind her again, put a trail of three slow, purposeful kisses over her shoulder, then brought his mouth to her ear.

“Whose bed are you in, Pansy?”

“Yours.”

“And your bed?”

“It’s yours.”

“Good girl.” She heard him remove his watch, and then his glasses, and set them on the table next to the bed that they shared, that was his. “How many was it last time?”

“Four.”

_Breathe in._

“Then you’ll give me five.”

_Breathe out._

“Yes, Sir.”

_Breathe in._

She felt his touch before it arrived.

“Count for me.”


End file.
